


How to Lose a Ghost in Ten Days

by follow_the_sun



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Exorcisms Via Stubbornness, F/F, Fluff and Crack, Ghost Sex, Ghost steve, House Flipping, M/M, Millennial Bucky, Obviously There's A Demon In The Printer, This Is What Happens When The Author Watches Approximately 11 Minutes of HGTV, Weird Academic Politics, Workplace Proximity Associates To Lovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-03 03:23:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 45,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21172616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun
Summary: “Renovate a house, they said. What could possibly be in the attic, they said. Squirrels, mouse poop, asbestos, portal to hell, mold, the usual.”





	1. Proof of Concept

_ “Hi, I’m Bucky Barnes—” _

_ “—And I’m Natasha Romanov.” _

_ “And we flip haunted houses!” _

_ [Cheerful introductory music plays] _

“Are you sure about this?” Bucky asked, for about the hundredth time since Natasha called him with the latest offer.

“Yes, James, I’m sure about this.” Natasha had—intentionally, Bucky was sure—slipped into the tone that implied she was speaking to a literal kindergartener. It wasn’t Bucky’s favorite thing to hear, but it was, in its way, weirdly reassuring when she felt secure enough to tell him he was being an idiot. “If we pull this off, it could literally be the score of a lifetime. An actual prewar detached family home in Brooklyn should go for as much as—”

“I’m not talking about the price, Nat,” Bucky said, looking up at the facade. “I mean, are we sure it’s actually haunted. Kinda defeats the whole purpose if it turns out it’s actually been empty all this time because of termites or sinkholes or murder hobos in the basement or some shit.”

Natasha closed her eyes, which did absolutely nothing to disguise the fact that she was rolling them so hard that she was in danger of pulling a muscle. “First of all, James,” she said, switching over to the Voice of Infinite Patience, which was far less reassuring than the other one, “if ‘murder hobos’ had driven twenty-three successive owners out of this property over the last seventy years, they’d either be dead or trying to sue for squatters’ rights by now. Properties in the middle of Brooklyn don’t just sit open unless there’s something catastrophically wrong with them, not in this market. And second, you just ruined what would have been a perfectly good intro.”

Bucky sighed. The fact that Natasha was very, very good at her job was what had gotten him to sign on for her crazy Youtube show in the first place, but sometimes her insistence on take after take until they achieved what she considered video perfection flew past “artistic vision” and landed somewhere around “bossy as hell.” At least once she left, he’d get a little more freedom to do this his way—she’d still mercilessly critique the way he did everything, and the worst part was that she’d be right, but at least she wouldn’t make him reshoot any footage unless it was genuinely awful. Still, they were burning daylight here, and the faster he got this over with, the faster she’d let him get a look at the inside. “So, Natasha,” he started over, “tell me about our new project. Has this property really been sitting empty for almost eighty years in the middle of Brooklyn because of one little haunting?”

Natasha’s annoyance had vanished the minute he started talking—or at least, she’d made it look that way, for the camera. “Well, James, you’re half-right. This is a fantastic prewar single-family home in one of the hottest real estate markets in the country, and we picked it up for barely a quarter of this neighborhood’s average listing price.”

“Wow,” Bucky said, genuinely impressed. Calculating back from what houses went for in Vinegar Hill these days, and assuming maybe a hundred grand in repairs, that could leave them with an easy quarter-mil apiece in profit. He wasn’t about the money, honestly—no, he knew how that sounded, but he really meant it; he wasn’t fancy, and in the absence of Natasha’s business venture, he would’ve been content to stay in Clint’s crappy apartment working some crappy job and feeling lucky when he had enough to splurge on beer and pizza. But the idea that one big score could settle all of his debt in one go and leave him with some extra cash to help out his family—well, for that kind of payout, he could put up with a lot more than Natasha’s drama-nerd theatrics. “So what you’re saying is, if we pull this off, we’re gonna be able to afford a lot of avocado toast.”

And Natasha wasn’t exactly bad company, either. Take right now, for instance—she was pursing her lips at him, pretending to be annoyed, but he could tell she wanted to smile, even at a cheap joke like that one. “Don’t start counting your chickens yet, James,” she went on, in her smoothest narration voice. “This isn’t exactly a run-of-the-mill haunting. The building was used as a boarding house during and after World War II, and the first reports of a ghost on the premises started showing up as early as 1947. According to the records I’ve tracked down, most of the residents left only weeks after moving in.”

Bucky knew a cue when he heard it. “Wasn’t that what you did after the war, though? I thought most GIs went home, bought one of those awful tract houses they were putting up everywhere, married their childhood sweethearts and, you know, did all the deeply heteronormative things.”

“Sure, maybe that accounts for some of the turnover, but the house almost immediately developed a reputation that went well beyond that. We’re talking about dozens of men, a lot of them battle-hardened soldiers, reporting similar paranormal events in this house over a period of several years. After the boarding house was sold and converted back into a private home, it saw a string of owners who stayed for short stints before selling again—sometimes at a profit, frequently at a loss. I’ve been trying to contact the previous owner for details. It seems like he intended to do the same thing we’re planning—fix it up to flip—but abandoned the project and let the house go to foreclosure. What we need to do is succeed where he failed.”

“Well, Nat, that sounds pretty scary, but…” Bucky looked into the camera, held up his backpack, and gave it a shake. “Let’s be real, none of the previous owners probably thought about deploying my secret weapon.”

“So you’re feeling pretty confident about this, then,” Natasha observed, neutrally enough that later, she’d be able to add a clip either telling the audience that she’d had faith in him all along, or that she’d known he was being an idiot about this one. He wasn’t offended; this was her show, and it was smart of her to look prescient, especially when he set it up like that. “Are you ready to go meet our ghost?”

Bucky grinned. “Natasha,” he said, “I cannot fucking wait.”

The ghost was watching them.

It had been worried about this ever since the redheaded woman had stopped her car in front of the house, stared at it for several minutes, and then gotten out of the car and walked, not to his front door, but to the house next door, where she’d knocked, been greeted warmly, and left an hour later with a plate of cookies covered in Saran Wrap. That was… bad. It was the kind of thing someone would do if they were scoping out the neighborhood to _ live _there, not just running by to do a bank assessment. And now the two of them were coming up the path. The ghost couldn’t leave the house, but it could see them through the gap in the dusty yellowed curtains on the transom: a young couple, late twenties, probably recently married and looking for a place to start a family. 

If it had had lungs, the ghost would have sighed. It never minded so much when it was just investors—it was clear that capitalism hadn’t gotten kinder since its lifetime, and reminding careless people with a lot of money that they couldn’t control everything just made its death’s work that much more satisfying—but it hated having to drive away hopeful people who were just trying to catch a break. The guy definitely looked blue-collar in a soft buttoned shirt, worn jeans, and work boots; the woman was also wearing jeans, but they looked designer (designer jeans! That was a thing now) over heeled boots that were stylish while staying just this side of impractical, and a brown jacket that clung to her curves nicely, if you liked that kind of thing. The ghost mentally commended her on the aesthetics of both her clothing and her partner, who looked at her with respect that bordered on awe. 

Well, it would go as easy as it could on them, but if push came to shove, the ghost wouldn’t compromise. It had one job to do in the afterlife, which was to keep this house empty, and by God, it was going to do it to the best of its ability.

It would be easier if it didn’t get too attached to them, so it retreated to the attic. The haunting would start, as it always did, at nightfall.

“So, if you’ve watched our show before,” Bucky said, addressing the digital video camera on the tripod while he hauled the foot locker of equipment into the living room, “you know that the first step to clearing out a haunting is to get a sense of exactly what we’re dealing with. And unfortunately, we’re not going into this one with a name and a face for our ghost. Natasha, wanna tell us what you’ve found out so far?”

“I’m afraid there isn’t much, James. In any old house like this, there’s a good chance people have died there, but the use of the building as a boarding house means there weren’t always good records of who was coming and going—or why. That’s especially true when we’re looking for deaths seventy years ago and in wartime. Fortunately,” she allowed herself a little smile, “I’m very good at research.”

“Yeah, only thing you’re better at is humility,” Bucky said dryly, setting the foot locker down where it would be within easy reach. It wasn’t like she hadn’t earned every ounce of confidence, but still. “What’ve you got?”

“Well, I’ve narrowed it down to three deaths that fall into the right time period,” she said, fanning out a handful of photocopies on the floor in front of her. That meant she’d intercut them with the video later, so he sat down beside her and made sure he was in the shot for the camera she’d propped up on his toolbox. “The first one is one of the owners of the boardinghouse, a Mrs. Sarah Roth. Died of tuberculosis in 1937.”

“Mm,” Bucky said doubtfully. “That’s kind of early, if the hauntings started after the war. And that’s a crappy way to go, but it doesn’t sound like she had anything in particular to avenge.”

“I agree. Also, you’d think a boardinghouse owner would have an incentive to keep people in, not drive them out. She’s mostly on the list because she’s associated with another death on the property—her son Steven, in 1946.”

“Please tell me it was a really grisly murder,” Bucky said hopefully. 

“Sorry to disappoint you, James, but his obituary just says ‘died after a short illness.’ In the pre-vaccination, pre-antibiotic days, that could’ve been anything from polio to an infected papercut. The timing is perfect for that one, though—it was only a few months before the first reported paranormal incident.”

“Okay, but you’ve gotta have something on the third guy, or you would’ve stopped there,” Bucky said, because he knew how Natasha worked. “Ooh! We have a mom and a son, is the third one the dad?”

“Not a chance. Harold Roth died in Miami in 1967. The third possibility is Aaron Zimmerman, a Swiss citizen who emigrated after the war. He makes the list because he did die under mysterious circumstances. His obituary reported heart failure—this was also in 1946, by the way—but I had a _ very _interesting conversation with a neighbor whose mother remembered all this, and apparently most of the neighborhood was convinced that he had ties to the Nazi regime.”

“Wait. Are you telling me,” Bucky said slowly, “that I might get to take a crack at an _ actual Nazi ghost? _Oh my God, Nat, it’s Christmas.”

She gave him a tolerant smile. “Again, I think it’s unlikely. We’re dealing with a pretty xenophobic time period in American history here. There’s a good chance it was all neighborhood gossip.”

“Why do you always gotta ruin all the fun with facts? Okay, well, are you at least gonna tell me what I should expect when I stay in the house tonight?”

“I thought you just said you were against ruining all the fun.” Natasha patted him on the arm and, purely for the benefit of the camera, said, “If I tell you what other people have experienced, it could bias you toward thinking you notice the same things. It’s best for our purposes if you go in cold, with as few preconceived ideas as we can manage.”

“You heard it here, folks. Natasha wants to watch me lose my shit for science as well as for fun,” Bucky said, and grinned when Natasha replied with a little one-shoulder shrug. “Okay, well, let me know when you dig up any more dirt on our three prospects. Meanwhile, I’ll get set up in here.” He cracked his knuckles—mostly so he could watch Natasha try not to flinch on camera—and said, “Time to get to work.”

When the ghost emerged, things had already started to change.

The young man—well, no younger than the ghost was in life, it supposed—had obviously spent hours hauling equipment into the house and unpacking, spreading out all over what had once been the dining room. The cobwebs had been swept off the walls and the chandelier light fixture, formerly the home of so much dust that it looked like it had grown fur, had been cleaned off and fitted with new, too-bright bulbs that drove all the carefully cultivated shadows into the corners. One wall had been coated with fresh white primer, still wet enough to be glossy, which had a further distressingly cheerful effect on the atmosphere. Sure, the situation was far from irredeemable, but it also wasn’t _ ideal. _Why couldn’t this kid have started in the old parlor with its perpetually rattling windows, or the kitchen, which practically haunted itself? The ghost had a tremendous amount of well-justified faith in its own abilities, and it had certainly learned to be flexible in some less-than-ideal situations, but the dining room was the most prosaic room in the house. It was almost like this kid was deliberately challenging him.

_ Then again, if you put it that way... _

The ghost didn’t have a physical body, but if anyone had been able to watch it, they would have seen its jaw clench, a habit from life that it didn’t even realize it had kept long after its body was dust. And then they would have seen it turn its gaze to the paint cans that were stacked carefully on a dropcloth, next to a stepladder. The lid for the primer had been pounded back onto the can, but the other can was open; the kid must have been planning what they called an _ accent wall, _ because even in the modern world, surely nobody would choose to paint an entire room with a deep burgundy that looked more than a little like the color of dried blood.

The ghost had been an artist, once. Sure, it only half-remembered most of its mortal life anymore, but it turned out, what they called muscle memory went deeper than hands and wrists. The ghost picked up a brush and went to work.

By the time the kid walked back into the room, with a sandwich in one hand and a beer bottle in the other, the ghost was pleased with its efforts. Sure, the middle part was a little bit cliche—anybody could write “GET OUT” on a wall in blood, but not everybody would put in an _ effort _to get the perfect drips, the right amount of spatter. The part where the ghost felt that it had really excelled, though, was the long, dragging finger-marks on either side. The longer the viewer looked at them, the more off it would seem, but it would take a concentrated effort to figure out why—that most human hands had five nails to dig into drywall, while the ghost had left the faintest suggestion of a sixth. 

In a way, it was a shame there was no one to talk to about the job. _ Arnie would have loved this, _ the thought came to him, unbidden, and for a moment there was… something, something the ghost could almost remember, like a long-ago but particularly vivid dream. It hurt, a little bit. The ghost wasn’t used to anything _ hurting. _It pushed the thought out of its mind, and instead of thinking, it retreated to a corner of the ceiling to watch the fireworks.

It got them, all right, but not exactly the way it had been expecting.

The kid dropped his beer, and that was good—a pretty strong reaction, even if it just hit the floor and rolled without a satisfying shatter. And the kid screamed, which… should have been good… except that it was the _ wrong _ kind of screaming. It wasn’t terror at all. It was… _ excitement. _

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaah,” the kid was still saying a minute later, while he picked up a little glass pad about the size of a pack of cigarettes and tapped on it frantically. The words _cellular telephone_ didn’t come into the ghost’s mind until it heard a click and a bored, _ “Zdorovo,” _in a woman’s voice that sounded faint and far away. 

_ “My ghost trap worked,” _ the kid shouted, and literally punched the air with the hand not holding the telephone before he tapped the glass again, bringing up a moving picture of the redheaded woman looking bemused. He swung the image toward the wall and continued, in a tone that was obviously deliberately hamming it up for an audience, “How’s _ that _ for ‘it’s too cheesy, the ghost’ll never fall for it,’ Natalia? _ Who’s laughing now, _Natalia?” 

“All right, all right,” the woman—Natalia? No, he’d called her something else before: Natasha—said, with a hint of laughter in her own voice. “I _ am _willing to admit that you’re capable of a good idea occasionally, James. Although I will point out that you just made yourself some completely unnecessary extra work by having to patch that drywall.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Like I wasn’t gonna have to strip a few walls down to the studs anyway, in an old dump like this.” James was still grinning. The ghost had the impression that even that much praise from Natasha was rare. And honestly, it was kicking itself, a little. How could it not have _ seen _this for the obvious trap that it was? Blood-colored paint, for Chrissake. 

All right, well, this was the first time the ghost had seen a trick like that—more to the point, it was the first time the ghost had seen anyone move in expecting a haunting, much less acting pleased about it—but it was possible to learn new things, even in the afterlife. The ghost might not remember much about his pre-death existence at this point, but it knew one thing: in life, it had been a legendarily stubborn human. And the truth was, it felt more like itself 

_ (himself? Yes, that sounded right, himself) _

than it—than he—had in years. As far as he was concerned, this new information didn’t change anything. He hadn’t hung on in the mortal plane, resisting the call of whatever the thing was that came after this, for an unknown and hazily remembered number of _ decades _just to give up when some young punk with a paint bucket started giving him grief. He was just going to have to outlast this one, just like all the others. He was going to stay here, like he’d always planned, until the house fell down around him and the thing in the attic was neutralized for good. 

This James obviously had no idea what he was in for, but the ghost was going to give him plenty to think about. After all, he had all the time in the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, faithful readers, I am as disappointed in myself for starting something new instead of finishing one of my many WIPs as you are. :\
> 
> This was supposed to be a fun little Halloween gift to you all, but of course it's taking longer (and GETTING longer) than it was supposed to. Anyway, I made a joke one time about how I'd like to make a career of flipping haunted houses and things went from there, as things are wont to do. Enjoy!


	2. Project Launch

Almost overnight, the weather in Brooklyn went from a late, lingering summer to autumn, and rain pattered against the elderly windows of the house while Bucky prepped the kitchen for demo. It was a three-stage process, like everything on Natasha’s show: first, figure out the cameras and lighting; second, prepare for the actual construction work; third, set up the ghost-proofing. Nat preferred to handle the first one, not quite trusting anyone else to get it right, and the second, in a house this far gone, wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been—at least he didn’t have to worry about protecting the rest of the house from construction dust, since half the rooms basically needed to be stripped to the studs anyway. (He was _ not _looking forward to ripping out the ancient pipes in the upstairs bathroom, Jesus.) A quarter of a million dollars was a hell of an incentive to get the job done, though. By the time he decided to break for lunch, everything was in place—including the clunky CD boombox that had proven, through trial and error, to be less sensitive to ghostly interference than iPhones or laptops with Bluetooth speakers. Nat had bitched about inferior sound quality on the videos, but as Bucky had reminded her, he was the one who was putting his ass on the line, so she’d reluctantly let him win that one.

He was pretty sure the ghost was watching while he did it. It was funny; at first he’d thought one of the things that made him well-suited to this job was that he wasn’t particularly sensitive to paranormal energy, but it turned out sensing ghosts was a skill you could develop, just like the other stuff that had initially been tough for him about construction work. Sometimes he could definitely feel a sense of malice radiating off whatever he was sharing the house with; more often it was just a general sense of presence, of not being alone. Either way, he’d gotten pretty well attuned to the patterns of ghostly behavior, and it was no longer hard to guess when they were about to make their move. A lot of ghosts kind of thought the same way they had in life, and that was their weakness. They weren’t ready for surprises, and the modern world was full of ’em.

“So as you can see, we’re starting in the kitchen,” he addressed the camera, once he had most of his equipment in place and he was more or less ready to start working. “Two reasons for that. One, obviously real important for making the property livable for the buyer. Anybody can slap some paint on a bedroom wall and freshen things up—you can check out Nat’s tutorial on color selection on our website, by the way—but your buyer is likely to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, and they’re going to want it to be a place where they feel at home. Second, this is the room that’s probably closest to the original design. It seems like it got a basic update sometime in the 1950s, but other than some appliance replacements, it’s mostly stayed the same since then. That’s great for keeping some of the original details—I’m definitely gonna salvage the cabinet pulls and probably some of the wood to repurpose elsewhere in the house—but it’s not so great in terms of getting rid of a haunting,. Ghosts tend to be more comfortable in places that haven’t changed a lot since they were alive. Not to mention this room is full of doors you can bang, hinges you can squeak, and some seriously ancient and inefficient windows. Fun fact, by the way: cold spots aren’t actually _ caused _ by ghosts, you usually have either drafts or bad HVAC to thank for that, but they do seem to have something to do with ghosts feeling welcome.”

_ Obviously, _the ghost thought, with the post-life equivalent of a snort of derision. Once you were dead, you were cold anyway, so dicey airflow didn’t bother you so much. Living things, on the other hand, ran hot and fast, and if they ended up in a cold spot, they were likely to get uncomfortable and move out of the space quickly, even if they didn’t consciously know why. That was more helpful to ghosts than they realized. Something in human brains just rebelled against having two things occupy the same space at the same time, even when one of the things was an incorporeal one. Not to mention that the living made better doors than windows, and nobody enjoyed having somebody else constantly blocking their view. 

It swooped in closer for a look at its options. Besides the aforementioned cabinet doors he would’ve slammed and drafts he would’ve blocked or increased if the kid hadn’t been wise to that trick already, the stove and sink hadn’t worked in years, so he was really only left with the light fixture to dim and, of course, that old classic, the sounds of footsteps and knocking when no one else was there (which, based on his complete lack of reaction when he tried it earlier, the kid apparently hadn’t even _ noticed). _ That was why the ghost preferred to look for options the living had brought in themselves. Tools were all right, and he’d resort to throwing them around if he had to, but it was more effective to use objects that had sentimental value. A lot of people, moving into a new place, would immediately bring in something personal to make it feel homey. The ghost generally regretted the need to destroy those kinds of things, but it was effective: smashing the glass in a framed family photo, for instance, even without damaging the photo itself, usually made even the most hardened cynic feel uneasy, and there were only so many stuffed animal massacres any living human would tolerate before they cut their losses. 

Unfortunately, James—who didn’t call himself James, the ghost had discovered; when he was alone, and speaking to the little devices that had eventually turned out to be some kind of super-miniaturized movie cameras, he called himself _ Bucky, _of all things—didn’t seem to have brought anything personal along at all. His construction tools seemed pretty prosaic, not to mention too bulky or heavy to sabotage even if he wanted to take a chance on really hurting the kid, and the cameras, which had originally looked promising, turned out to be fairly well insulated against supernatural interference. The ghost had gotten several of the screens to go fuzzy for a few minutes, but that had only made Bucky mutter at them and make adjustments until they were clear again. Bucky was turning toward one of those now, the one that was focused on a battered black plastic device on the floor. 

The kid’s back was toward the ghost, though, which did provide him with one fairly obvious idea. It wasn’t subtle, but it never failed to get a reaction. He drifted up behind Bucky, keeping a careful distance. For some reason, it took more energy to solidify enough to touch a living person than it did to get to the point of being able to throw things around a room, so he was saving it up for just the right moment.

“Anyway, speaking of ghosts feeling welcome,” Bucky began, with no idea of his impending doom, “I’ve mentioned before that I have a secret weapon that makes it a lot harder for a ghost to get a good haunting on. I’m gonna deploy that right now,” he concluded, and bent down to the plastic box, pressing down on a button marked with a triangle. Perfect; while he was leaning over like that, all unsuspecting, the ghost stretched out his hands, ready to close his cold ethereal fingers around either side of Bucky’s neck—

_ Oh. My. God. Becky, LOOK at her BUTT. _

The ghost jumped, which, in its only partially manifested form, meant that it basically flung itself six feet backward before it realized what was happening. What the _ hell? _ Where had a woman’s voice come from all of a sudden? It—oh. The ghost was a complete idiot, because obviously, all James-Bucky had done was turned on a goddamn _ radio. _

_ It is so big, _ the recorded voice continued, unaware of the ghost’s predicament. _ She looks like one of those rap guys’ girlfriends. But, you know, who understands those rap guys? _

“Now you might be wondering if this means I have no taste in music at all,” Bucky said, turning to face the camera again and smiling brightly, as a thumping bass line kicked in under the recorded voice, echoing off the bare walls of the kitchen. “And the answer is, _ nope. _As Natasha will tell you, I have absolutely none. And you know what else? I LIKE BIG—”

_ What the ever-loving _ ** _fuck,_ ** the ghost thought, and by the time it had the presence of mind to collect itself, it had drifted almost all the way through the farthest wall and out of the kitchen entirely. The kid, meanwhile, had picked up a sledgehammer and swung it hard at one of the ancient Formica countertops, still chanting along to the words on the recording. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, had he really just said ‘ _ that butt you got makes me so horny’? _ Sure, the ghost had figured out that social mores in the outside world were moving on in about the 1960s, when a whole generation of local kids started breaking into what they thought was an abandoned house to practice _ free love, _ but were you actually allowed to say things like this on the radio these days, where _ children _could hear it? 

Eerily, almost as if he’d heard the ghost’s thoughts, Bucky turned toward the camera again and grinned. “You like this, ghost?” he asked, spreading his arms wide. “Wait’ll you hear the next song on my playlist. It’s _ even worse than this one,” _ and the ghost actually groaned out loud, a sound that might have been audible to Bucky if the music hadn’t been blasting How was he supposed to build up a good cloud of fear around a kid who was singing along to a song about the relative desirability of whatever an _ Oakland booty _was? This, he thought glumly, was going to be more difficult than he’d thought.

“I have a question,” Clint said, when Bucky walked out of the house, handed him an open beer, and clinked his own bottle against it before settling in next to him on the stoop. “How did you get like this?”

“Like what? An asshole?” Bucky asked guilelessly, and grinned at the face Clint made: an “I’m not saying that, but I’m not exactly denying it either” expression. He’d only known Clint for a couple months, since fate and a Craigslist ad had thrown them together as two people equally desperate to find a new roommate in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, but it had been a nice surprise to discover that he actually really liked the guy. “It’s okay to say it. I mean, it’s literally my job to annoy the fuck out of ghosts on a professional level. Thinking about printing up some business cards, actually. ‘J.B. Barnes, Professional Ghost-Hassling Asshole.’”

“Sure, okay. So I know you picked up the DIY stuff working for your uncle’s construction firm, but how does a guy get started in the ghost-hassling business? Because, you know, I don’t scare easy, but even I think twice about fucking around with the afterlife, you feel me?”

“Yeah, I get what you’re asking.” Bucky took a long pull of his own beer, leaning back against the bricks. There was just enough space for both of them to fit under the awning, out of the way of the water dripping off the old gutters, and the air was cool and crisp, all the late summer humidity washed away by the rain. Just about time to call his littlest two sisters and see if they’d decided they were too old for apple picking and corn mazes yet; if they hadn’t, he might try to convince Nat that giving him one weekend off for a trip upstate wouldn’t blow her schedule. “I blame my parents, mostly. They were always really into Halloween and horror movies and generally scary stuff. I think I was eight the first time I saw _ The Shining, _ and I would’ve been… oh, I guess eleven, maybe, when I got real sick and was stuck in bed for like a month and Mom decided to keep me from going crazy by reading me _ The Stand.” _

“Okay, you know I was in the foster system for most of my childhood, right? Because I want you to understand the full weight I’m putting behind this when I say, Barnes, buddy, that is _ messed up.” _

Bucky shrugged, running his thumb idly over the peeling label of the beer bottle. “Actually prepared me pretty well for the rest of my life, if you can believe that. Both my folks died in a car crash a month before I turned sixteen.”

“Oh. Jesus, man, I’m sorry.”

“S’okay. Ancient history, you know?” It was half true; nothing could’ve made it _ okay, _ exactly, but he’d never been a sheltered kid, not like some of the other shell-shocked orphans in the grief counseling groups he’d washed in and out of in his late teens. In a way, having a framework for the fact that bad things could happen to anybody, for no reason except that the world could be a shitty place sometimes, had been kind of a blessing. “I went through a pretty hardcore goth phase, I guess—Becks still has some photos of me in all black with eyeliner and all that shit—but the thing is, I _ processed _it. By the time I went off to college, being interested in weird horror stuff was back to being less of a coping mechanism and more of a thing I did for fun. Even tried to join the campus paranormal activities club, but as soon as I walked in, I could tell most of the kids there wouldn’t’ve known a real supernatural entity from the shit they sell off the rack at Spirit Halloween. The only other person who seemed to actually have a clue was this little redhead who kept rolling her eyes at me every time somebody said something really stupid. So after the meeting, I went over and introduced myself, and the rest is history.”

“Well, if you like being terrified on purpose, I can definitely see how you hit it off with Natasha.” Clint glanced around in mock uneasiness. “Uh, you don’t have a camera on me right now, do you? Because if you do, there’s some footage I need to destroy.”

“Okay, first off, everything we use is cloud-based in case a ghost fucks up one of the cameras, so good luck with that,” Bucky told him dryly. “But nothing’s recording us right this second, so your secret’s safe with me. And by the way, if you’re hinting around at what I think you are, the deal with her and me is, we tried going out a couple times, but we broke it off as soon as it started to feel weirdly less like she was my girlfriend and more like I’d picked up another bratty little sister by accident. So if you wanna ask her out, I say go for it.”

Clint snorted a laugh that almost sent beer up his nose. “Uh, no disrespect, Barnes, but did you not just hear the part about the abject terror that is Natasha Romanoff? If she reminds you of your little sisters, I hope I never meet them in person.”

“Yeah, I probably won’t be able to keep ‘em from visiting me forever, but I’m gonna keep up the whole ‘my new apartment is too small for company’ dodge as long as I can, for both our sakes.” Bucky stood up, setting his empty bottle down on the stoop. “Ready to get back to work?”

“Hey, man, for fifty bucks an hour, I can haul drywall all goddamn day.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel about listening to terrible music that makes ghosts go crazy,” Bucky said. “Oh, speaking of which, you probably wanna turn off your hearing aids before we go back in there.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure which CD’s in the changer right now, but it could be either the one with eleven repetitions of ‘What’s New Pussycat’ or the one with fifteen repetitions of ‘Let It Go’ from _ Frozen.” _

“Barnes, you are a sadistic bastard,” Clint said, with deep admiration. 

If either of them had been able to see the ghost that was watching them through the open living room window at that moment, they would have seen him slump glumly as they sat there chatting, completely unbothered by his proximity. He’d never seriously sat down and thought about how limited his repertoire was before. He’d never _ needed _to before, because most people, he was coming to realize, were strictly amateur-hour when it came to dealing with ghosts at all. But every day of progress on the downstairs part of the house brought the kid closer to the upstairs, which would need a lot less work to become livable again… and every inch of progress on the upstairs would bring him closer to the attic, and that simply couldn’t be allowed to happen under any circumstances.

The ghost was going to have to step up his game, and he knew just where to start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Halloween!


	3. Stakeholder Interview

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter, because dang, it's hard to get into Natasha's head.

“So I just thought I should tell you,” Bucky said, on the other end of the phone line, “that things got weird at the house today.”

“Weird how, James?” If Natasha sounded bored, it was because she _ was _ bored. Three hours she’d wasted in the campus library combing through old local newspapers on microfiche, looking for information about any of her three ghost candidates’ predecedent lives, and all she’d gotten out of it was dry eyes and a headache. In her experience, it was a common problem among academics: they all _ said _they lived for the purity of research and scholarship, but they actually lived for gossip and scandal, and her files on the ghost candidates were painfully devoid of human interest. Aaron Zimmerman, the immigrant, hadn’t even lasted long enough in the United States to have an interesting obituary, while Sarah Roth and her son hardly fared any better in terms of the public record. If she didn’t find something juicy on one of these people soon—

“The ghost threw a rat at me,” Bucky said grimly.

Natasha sat up straight. “Was the rat alive?” she demanded. Now that she could work with.

“No, ew. It was, like, dried out and mummified. Probably been dead since the Eisenhower Administration. Not that that makes it a whole lot better that _ a ghost threw a rat at me, Natalia.” _

“Are you sure the ghost was behind this? It didn’t just fall out of a loose ceiling tile?”

The thing about Bucky—the thing about a lot of men, come to think of it—was that once they got upset about some minor thing like this, it was faster to let them get it all out of their systems before you tried to get them to be reasonable again. Once she judged that Bucky had finished swearing, Natasha brought the phone back to her ear and said, “I’m sorry you had to deal with that, _ lapochka, _ but please tell me you got it on video.”

One of the best things about Bucky was that he sincerely did know how to move on from a setback—and that even when he was furious, it didn’t take him long to recover his sense of humor. Working with ghosts was nothing if not good for a person’s sense of perspective. “Yeah, yeah, I know: it’s gonna make for great television. And credit where it’s due, I didn’t think there was a ghost left in this city who could still surprise me, even if it was by being a complete punk-ass jerk.”

“Wow, you two are practically twins.”

“Yeah, I know you’re being sarcastic, but I could almost respect the guy’s moxie. If he hadn’t, you know, _ thrown a rat at my face.” _

“Oh, stop whining. You’ve had all your shots. Did you get the linoleum up?”

It was an obvious attempt to change the subject, but Bucky was smart enough to roll with it. “Yeah, and you were right, it’s original hardwood underneath. Gonna look amazing once I get it sanded down and refinished.”

“Well, don’t get too attached to it, James. The house _ or _the ghost. Remember, our ultimate goal is to get rid of both of them as fast as possible.”

Bucky gave a little huff of laughter at that. “Trust me, after the rat thing, I’m not exactly eager to stick around. How about you? Anything new?”

“I have a few promising leads.” 

“That bad? We’re both having fucking terrible days, I guess.”

Natasha let herself smile. Bucky wasn’t only her best friend, he was sincerely one of the best things that had ever happened to her. Hell, in another life, they might have made a truly amazing power couple. “I’ve got an appointment to get to,” she said. “I’ll come by the house this evening,” and once they’d said their goodbyes, she slid her phone back into her bag and stood up, unable to suppress a sigh as she steeled herself to walk back into the library and clean up her nearly-worthless notes before she headed out.

“Let me guess,” said a voice behind her—female, heavily accented, and nearly as tired as Natasha’s. “You have to go teach a class with Actually Daniel in it.”

Natasha turned, raising an eyebrow. “‘Actually Daniel’? I don’t think I’m familiar with that one.”

Wanda managed a smile of her own, although it had to work to get through the same look of grim resignation that Natasha had seen on a thousand TAs’ faces. “‘_ Actually, _Ms. Maximoff, Sokovia wasn’t a country until after the Soviet Union broke up.’ That Daniel.”

“Ohhh, you mean ‘I watched a movie about the Russian Revolution, so I know more than you’ Daniel,” Natasha agreed, with a solemn nod. “No, my students this semester are fine. I just don’t really like… people. There’s a chance I might be in the wrong line of work.”

She hadn’t really meant it as a joke, but Wanda laughed anyway. “Then it’s a good thing you’re only here until your side hustle pays off, isn’t it?”

“How do you know about that?” 

“I don’t really. But I know you have some project you’re working on, and it isn’t hard to guess that this job is only a stepping stone to whatever you really want.” Wanda hesitated, then added, “Let me know if I can help.”

“Thanks, but I doubt it.” Wanda was already stretched too thin, and besides… Up till now, not many people had connected Natalie Rushman, tenure-track-hopeful assistant professor, with Natasha Romanov, Youtuber extraordinaire. One day—within a couple of months, if the Vinegar Hill house paid off like she planned—she was going to mail her last student loan payment, legally change the name her American adoptive parents had saddled her with back to the one she’d gotten at birth, ditch the grueling publish-or-perish culture of academia, and finally answer to nobody but herself. And if word somehow got back to the ’rents that she intended to reject the future they’d mapped out for her in favor of full-time ghost hunting… Well, it wasn’t that she was afraid of confrontation, but the Rushmans still pulled enough of the strings on her life that they could make the “I’m quitting ballet” disaster look like a picnic by comparison. For now, it was safer to keep everyone at arm’s length.

Wanda, though... Wanda was almost worth making an exception for.

Natasha was nothing if not results-oriented, so by the time she’d made her way out to Queens, she was entirely focused on business. She walked into the nursing home as if she had every right to be there—which she did, but she didn’t want anyone left with the impression that she was a stranger coming in to take advantage of the elderly, even if she technically kind of was. “She has good days and bad days,” the attendant warned her as she went in, but today was a good day, judging from the fact that the old woman was studying her with clear, piercing eyes from the moment she walked in the door. “Hello, Mrs. Carter. It’s an honor to meet you,” she began, taking a page from Bucky’s book: with old people, he said, it never hurt to lay on an extra-thick coating of charm.

“Oh, please, dear, call me Peggy.” The old woman smiled at her, and Natasha suddenly realized that Margaret Carter must have been incredibly beautiful when she was young. In a way, she still was. “I kept my maiden name when I married, and tacking ‘Mrs.’ onto it never seemed to fit quite right. And for you, do you prefer Natasha or Natalia?”

Natasha raised an eyebrow. “Natasha is fine,” she said. “Not many people even realize it’s a nickname.”

“Well, some people do their research when a stranger comes to visit them,” Peggy said, with surprising briskness for someone who’d lived for nearly a century. “I have a niece who comes by once a week to help me with the tablet computer. We both very much enjoyed your show—she more than I, I think, although that had more to do with your partner taking his shirt off at the slightest provocation. A very handsome young man, your friend Bucky.”

“And believe me, he knows it,” Natasha said, but inside she _ might _have been screaming with glee, just a little. She’d known Peggy Carter for thirty seconds and she already wanted to be adopted as her new granddaughter. “Peggy, do you mind if I record our conversation?”

“I think you’d better. I’m ninety-six years old; there’s no guarantee I’ll be here next week if you try to come back for fact-checking.” Whatever Natasha’s face did—it couldn’t have been much, but apparently it was something—Peggy laughed softly at it. “I do think we owe it to ourselves to be realistic, don’t you, dear? Now, tell me, what is it you want to know about the old Roth boarding house? I might not be the best person to speak to, honestly; I only lived there for a few months, and it was a very long time ago.”

“That’s all right.” Natasha set her phone on the bedside table, with the speaker facing Peggy, and made sure the recording had started. “I’m interested in some of the people who rented rooms in the house. There was a man named Aaron Zimmerman who lived there about the same time as you, and I’m also interested in the owner, Mrs. Roth, and her son Steven.”

“Oh, I’m going to be a tremendous disappointment to you on two of those at least. Sarah Roth died years before I moved in, I’m afraid, and I only knew Mr. Zimmerman in passing. He was Swiss, you know, and quite impressively intelligent—one of many scientists who defected during the War. People said he did experiments for the Nazis, terrible things, but once you met him, it was hard to give that story any credit. He was one of those fussy little men, always worrying about having everything just so. It was just that he died so suddenly—perhaps his heart, or a stroke; we didn’t have much in the way of postmortems in those days—so he never had time to live down the rumors that followed him like they would have followed any stranger. I’m sure he would have seemed quite ordinary, once things settled down after the War.”

“There was really nothing unusual about him, then? Did he ever speak much about his life before the War?”

“Not that I remember, but as I said, my dear, I only lived downstairs from him, and scarcely knew him to say hello. We came from very different worlds, after all.”

Natasha was dying to ask about Peggy’s world, actually. Peggy herself was obviously British, and given the timing, she easily could have come across the ocean as a war bride, but Natasha’s gut said there was more to her story than that. If she got a chance to come back, she was going to pry like hell, but today her time was short, and she needed to stay focused. “Tell me about Steve, then,” she prompted. “Did he serve in the War?”

“No, but it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying.” Peggy’s expression had gone soft at the mention of that name, her eyes slightly misty. “His health was too poor for the Army to take him—he was quite small, five-foot-four in his stocking feet and a hundred pounds soaking wet, and he had asthma and a weak heart. All the same, he wanted nothing more than to go and fight. He told me once that if he was destined to die young, the least he could do was make it mean something. It was a very cruel fate, I thought, that he wasn’t even allowed to have that.”

Natasha was working hard to hide her mounting fascination, because the young man Peggy was describing was, in her experience, _ exactly _the kind of person who usually ended up as a ghost. Young, all too aware that they were trapped in circumstances that made them weak and ineffectual in life, determined and frustrated and wanting to make a mark on the world but dead too soon to do it: it was practically textbook. “What did he die of?” she asked, as gently as she could.

“He caught the flu,” Peggy said softly. “It was a bad winter for it. I wasn’t with him when he passed. I had… responsibilities to carry out, but I always felt I should have tried harder to be there. I’ve lived a good life, and I have precious few regrets, all things considered, but one thing I do wish…” 

Her words trailed off, and her eyes went hazy, fixed on some point off in the middle distance somewhere. “What do you wish, Peggy?” Natasha finally prompted, and Peggy refocused her eyes on her and looked slightly startled for a heartbeat or two before she sighed.

“Oh, I’m being so silly,” she said. “Bring me another cup of coffee, won’t you, Angie? No one else makes it as well as you.”

Natasha only let herself blink once before she smiled. “Of course, Peggy. I’ll be right back with that,” she said, and she managed not to react any _ more _than that until she’d scooped up her phone and her coat and slipped quietly out of the room. Once she was out in the hall and around the corner, though, she paused, leaning against the wall and closing her eyes.

Peggy wasn’t a woman who gave much away, but neither was Natasha, which meant she knew how to read signs that a lot of people were inclined to miss. And she’d come away from the meeting with a lot of valuable information, all right, but somehow, she was still leaving with more things she didn’t understand than she’d had when she went in.

Steve was the ghost. After what she’d heard today, Natasha felt at least eighty-five percent certain of that. And saying that Peggy had been, in the parlance of the day, _ sweet on _ a certain tragic young man was starting to seem like an understatement. Everything Peggy had said about him had come across as sincere to the point of being what Bucky, the big softie, would unironically call an _ actual fuckin’ tragedy _when she told him about it later.

But if that was so, then why was she so dead certain that every word Peggy had said to her about Aaron Zimmerman was a lie?

She was in the car on the way home—sure, every penny counted, but when she had to go to Queens at this hour, she damn well treated herself to a ride share—when her phone made the incoming text sound, twice in quick succession. Both were from Bucky, of course. The first message read, _ Fucking GHOST. _The second was a photo of a tipped-over Starbucks cup, lying on the freshly scraped hardwood floor in a pool of spilled coffee.

She covered her mouth with her hand, even though there was no one to see her smile. Poor Steve-the-Ghost probably had no idea, but Natasha knew immediately that this meant war.


	4. Risk Management

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for injury/accident in this chapter. (Also feels, but since you're in this fandom, it's already too late.)

“And here,” Clint said, panning the camera across the living room and halfway up the staircase, “we have an example of the ghost-hassling asshole in his natural habitat. Notice both the nest-building behavior and the display of abdominal muscles, both key factors in his attempts to attract a mate.”

“Piss off, Clint,” Bucky said wearily, glaring down at him. “Or don’t, but if you’re gonna be in here, make yourself useful and start picking up those goddamn little plastic caps. I swear, they fuckin’  _ design  _ those things to get dropped the second you get on a ladder.”

“Observe how this specimen uses both visual and auditory cues to mark his territory and frighten away predators,” Clint went on, not making any move to pick up the orange plastic wire caps that littered the floor. He panned the camera up the wall instead. Bucky had peeled off layers of wallpaper haphazardly, trying to assess the condition of the wallboard underneath, which had left a horrifically ugly patchwork of stripes, assorted flowers, and one orange and brown geometric design that might have been stylish for a minute in 1975 before the decorating world sobered up and reconsidered its life choices. Since it couldn’t get any worse, he’d amused himself briefly by taking a Sharpie to the cleanest patches and drawing a variety of “NO GHOSTS ALLOWED” signs, all charmingly illustrated, if he did say so himself. He’d made sure they were all just different enough from the Ghostbusters logo that he wouldn’t have Natasha on his ass about copyright infringement, but he figured the ghost had gotten the point, because lately, its actions had a distinctly sulky vibe.

“Put the camera back, Clint,” Natasha said, from the kitchen doorway. “We’re not paying you to stand around, and I’m  _ definitely  _ not paying you to mess up my recording equipment.”

“Uh, actually I kind of am paying him to stand around, Nat. This goes way faster with a second person to throw the breaker so I don’t have to run down to the basement every five minutes to turn it on and off.”

“And yet, somehow, he’s up here.” Natasha tossed a folder onto the equipment tub that was serving them as a coffee table before lowering herself onto the futon Bucky had dragged in for coffee breaks. “Found some information on the ghost,” she said, casually enough that Bucky knew she was feeling incredibly smug about it.

“Yeah?” Bucky set the pliers down and climbed down from the ladder, then down the half-flight of stairs from the landing where the ladder was. “Whatcha got?”

“Well, for starters, your ghost is a stubborn ass.”

“Christ, Nat, I thought you were gonna tell me something I didn’t know.” Bucky opened the folder and flipped through the photocopied sheets. “This is an Army enlistment form. Why’s there five copies of it?”

“Look closer. The form’s the same; the information isn’t. Our friend Steven went to five different Army recruitment centers trying to enlist. Every borough, I’m guessing.” Natasha tapped the  _ Place of Birth  _ line. “We have Steve from Brooklyn, Steve from New Haven, Steve from Paramus…”

“Wow, Jersey? Guy was fuckin’ shameless. What’s next, Steve from Ohio?” Bucky turned and looked directly into the nearest camera. “Hot tip, kids: if you ever want to get asked zero questions about your hometown because it’s the most boring place on the planet, get born in Shelbyville, Indiana.” He turned back to Natasha and said, for the benefit of the eventual audience, “If he was this desperate to go fight the Nazis, why didn’t they take him?”

“Throw a dart at a medical encyclopedia. Asthma, scoliosis, heart murmur, bad eyesight, bad hearing, and my personal favorite, pernicious anemia. Plus he was five-four and weighed ninety-five pounds. Not exactly military material.”

“Ouch. Persistent little fucker, though, huh?  _ So nothing’s changed about that,”  _ Bucky said pointedly, to the ceiling.

It might have interested him to know that the ghost wasn’t actually listening to him at that point. The ghost was, in fact, hovering in the basement, in the middle of an ethical dilemma, which was: How far was he willing to go to stop these kids from getting into the attic? 

On the one hand, it had been his only purpose in the afterlife for seventy years, and he was… failing. There was no reason to kid himself about that. He obviously couldn’t scare off Bucky and Natasha, and now it was becoming clear that he couldn’t frustrate them out of the house either. Okay, so what he’d done so far had felt more like a prank war than anything else—misplaced tools, tripped breakers, a broken pipe that had flooded the kitchen with rust-colored water—but the fact was, all this time he’d been fucking around, trying to do this as painlessly as possible, because he’d gotten sentimental about the kid in spite of all his own best efforts. And that had done nothing but exhaust his scant reserves of spiritual energy while they made more and more progress. He hadn’t realized how  _ much  _ progress until Bucky had started on the stairway, but the only place he had to go from there was up to the second floor, and the attic wouldn’t be far behind. He was running out of options.

The worst part of being dead, he thought, was not having anybody to talk to about any of this. There’d been people in his life, once, hadn’t there? A tubby kid whose name might have been Arnie, who’d been either a brother or a friend—he honestly couldn’t remember which; a brunette woman whose face he remembered in soft focus, like a silent movie star. And someone else, a blonde woman, whose face was a mist but whose voice still hovered around the edges of his long memory... But they were gone, all of them. Hell, the closest thing he’d had to a friend in seventy years was the stray cat who’d squeezed in through a broken window frame to give birth to kittens in the basement, and she’d died at least two decades ago. (Even now, one of her descendants would occasionally pop by, give him a respectful  _ mrowr,  _ and drop half a mouse on the porch, but they all seemed to have important cat business elsewhere that precluded any kind of permanent residency.) 

But they’d been part of the deal too, hadn’t they? When he stayed here, when he gave up his chance at walking down that same bright tunnel he’d watched the mother cat walk into, tail held high, without hesitation… part of him had known he was giving them up, too. And since he had given them up, his sacrifice had damn well better be worth it.

The ghost squared his ephemeral shoulders and clenched his incorporeal jaw. He had a duty. He’d accepted the task of guarding this house come what may, and that meant facing up to the idea that maybe the end did justify the means, that maybe the good of the many did outweigh the good of the few. That sometimes the best way to protect someone was to hurt them a little now to prevent them from being hurt a lot more later.

Oh, hell. He was going to have to do it.

Well, if seventy years of watching and waiting had taught him anything, it was that the window for dealing with living things was short, and if you hesitated, you were sure to find out that it was already too late. So the ghost braced himself and floated up through the ceiling to do what needed to be done.

Upstairs, Bucky stood up from the futon and stretched. “Well, this has been enlightening and everything, but I’ve gotta get back to work. I want to finish that fixture and maybe get over to the hardware store before they close.”

“Again, James? That’s the third time this week.”

“Which means I’m  _ way  _ below average and you should appreciate my good planning,” Bucky told her, climbing back onto the ladder. “Clint, get over here and hand the sconce up to me once I’m up here, will you?”

“Two seconds.” Clint was sliding his finger in circles on his phone screen. “There’s a Pokémon here I’m trying to catch.”

“Are you kidding me right now, Barton?”

“Hey, I thought we were on our government-mandated fifteen-minute break. And anyway, you gotta give me this one, it’s a Farfetch’d.”

“Yeah, chill out, Barnes, it’s a Farfetch’d,” Natasha said dryly, leaning back on the couch and pulling out her own phone.

“You could come over here and help me too, you know.”

“Sure, as soon as I’m finished sending Barton my trainer code. I have a ton of bird types I can trade him, since that seems to be his thing. If I find out he’s on Team Mystic, though, he’s fired.”

“I got a bird type right here for both of you,” Bucky pretended to growl, turning around to face them and raising both middle fingers at once. Unfortunately, that meant letting go of the ladder, but Bucky wasn’t stupid; he’d locked it in place before he started the project, and his feet were still safely planted on one of the lower rungs. Besides which, he was on the landing between two sets of stairs, so if anything started to go wrong, he should have been able to throw his weight in the other direction and count on the upper staircase to partially break his fall.

So it was extremely unfortunate that he was both distracted and facing the wrong way at the exact moment the ghost crashed into the ladder.

The house was full of people, and then it wasn’t.

Bucky was awake and talking by the time they took him away, but the smear of blood on the wall was still there, bright and accusing.

The ghost sat alone in the dark.

It wasn’t possible for him to really curl up on the floor of the basement, but he was doing his best afterlife equivalent of it when he heard the lock turn and the front door swing open. He rocketed up through the basement ceiling and the kitchen floor, expecting Natasha at best and a fresh real estate agent at worst—which would solve one problem while creating a dozen more that he didn’t want to think about. But it was Bucky, looking pale and shaky, shrugging off his unbuttoned coat to reveal his lower left arm in a sling and his upper left arm in a shoulder brace.

He sat on the futon for several minutes without moving, leaning back and looking tired. Then, without opening his eyes, he said, “Hey, motherfucker, you there?”

The ghost assumed that was him, and projected a general feeling of  _ yes  _ in his direction before he remembered that was stupid. But Bucky opened one eye and squinted almost right at him. “I hope that was a yes,” he said, “because I’m gonna feel really fucking stupid if I’m talking to an empty house here. But then again, you probably don’t have anything better to do, am I right? So c’mon, come over here and take a look.” He raised his right hand and pointed. “Three stitches in my scalp, first off. Weirdly, I’m not even that mad about that one. I mean, at least it’s up under my hair, so if it scars, it won’t show. Pretty sure you didn’t even manage to give me a concussion, which, come on, were you even trying? The broken arm, though, that’s pissing me off, because now I’m out of commission for six weeks minimum. There’s some stuff Nat was gonna bring in contractors for anyway, so it doesn’t completely halt the project, but we were kinda both counting on having the house on the market by Christmas. Oh, and if my shoulder still hurts in a couple weeks, then after the swelling goes down I get to go back for an MRI to see if I fucked up my rotator cuff, so, that’s probably gonna be six thousand dollars out of my cut I can kiss goodbye. Nat made me buy insurance when I signed on for the show, thank fuck, but that surprise ambulance trip already ate up almost all the savings I was gonna live off until our next payday, and I cannot emphasize enough how much I can’t afford any subsequent medical bullshit. So, thanks for that.”

The ghost absorbed this quietly, avoiding looking at Bucky and tracing his gaze over the woodgrain of the floor. He’d take whatever guilt trip Bucky decided to dish out. He deserved it.

“So it’s pretty clear we’re at an impasse here, right? Because Nat was right about one thing: You’re obviously not any run of the mill ghost. And I can’t bring in contractors who are gonna be up on ladders, or working with electricity or power tools, until I know they’re not gonna get hurt on my watch.” Bucky sighed. “Jesus, I knew this was gonna happen one of these days, but I’m such  _ shit  _ at this stuff. And Nat, God love her, she’s great, but she ain’t exactly queen of the warm fuzzy feelings. In fact, once she finds out I’m here today, I’m pretty sure she’s gonna wait for me to heal up and then kick my ass all over again out of spite. But I was thinking that maybe… we could… talk.”

The ghost hovered in stunned silence—well, more silence than usual—for a long moment. Then he sent a powerful mental wave of aggravation at the dumb kid, because on the off chance that he  _ could  _ feel it, the ghost didn’t want to spare him an ounce of it. And the kid, damn him,  _ chuckled  _ a little bit. “Sorry,” he said, “I guess that sounded pretty stupid. I don’t mean like  _ talk  _ talk, though, I know ghosts can’t usually do that. How about we just say, um, communicate. Try to come up with a way to solve this that, even if it doesn’t make us both happy, at least nobody else has to get hurt. So just, um, knock on something, or push something  _ that is not me  _ over, if you’re all right with this plan.”

The ghost let that sink in for a moment. Then he knocked, just once but firmly, on the nearest floorboard, and Bucky visibly relaxed. “Okay. So tonight I’m gonna go home and space out on Tylenol with codeine while I comfort-watch a movie I’ve seen ninety-seven times, and tomorrow I’ll be back with a couple things we can try out.” He stood up, pulling on his coat—or trying to, anyway; he got his arm into the right sleeve just fine, but he couldn’t reach behind him to bring it over his left shoulder. 

The ghost never made a conscious choice to cross the room, and he definitely didn’t realize he was going to grab the coat and tug it into place until Bucky started, then barked a short, surprised laugh. “Thanks,” he said, as he moved toward the door. Then he paused, hand on the knob. 

“By the way,” he said, “for right now, are you okay with doing the ‘knock once for yes, knock twice for no’ thing?”

The ghost didn’t see that he had much of a choice, but it was nice to be asked. He knocked, once.

“Okay,” Bucky said, “good. So, do you remember very much about your life, before you were here?”

The ghost hesitated, wondering if this was more of a test or a trick, then reluctantly tapped the floor twice more.  _ Knock. Knock.  _

“How about your name? Do you remember what your name was?”

A longer hesitation this time, because, frankly, it hurt to admit that he didn’t. It didn’t come up much when there was nobody to talk to for seventy years at a stretch. It wasn’t until Bucky added, “It’s not weird if you don’t; a lot of ghosts sort of lose their histories when they’re alone as long as you’ve been,” that he could bring himself to answer:  _ Knock. Knock.  _

“Okay,” Bucky said, “well, I think your name is Steve,” and then, while the ghost was still frozen in midair, feeling as if he’d been struck by lightning, he said, “See you tomorrow,” and went out the door before the ghost

before the ghost

before  _ Steve  _ could tell him that it was as if the name had jarred something loose in him, and now memories were coming back in a flood.

And by the time Bucky came back the next morning, Steve remembered everything.


	5. Communication Modeling

When Bucky came into the house, wearing a backpack slung over his right shoulder and lugging a medium-sized leather case that seemed too heavy for its size, Steve was waiting for him in the living room. “Hey, asshole, you miss me?” Bucky addressed the empty air, before dropping the case, with a _ thud _that confirmed its weight, and settling in on the floor beside it. 

Steve knocked once for _ yes, _ and Bucky laughed, although even the small motion made him grimace and rub his injured shoulder. “Okay, so before I get started, I wanna tell you that actually contacting spirits is way outside my usual area. So my expertise on this shit consists one hundred percent of what I read on the internet last night, which, if I’m really being honest, I didn’t even get through much of _ that _before I went down a rabbit hole and wound up reading half the r/stupidghosts subreddit, and I know you don’t know what that is but trust me, I was up way too late and I have regrets. So if you could see fit not to fuck with my coffee? I’d appreciate it.”

Steve knocked once again, and Bucky nodded and took a travel mug out of the backpack. “I am _ trusting _ you here,” he reiterated, and Steve did his best to project cooperative feelings (which, honestly, went against his nature, but he could try). “Right,” he said, “so I have some stuff to try. And by the way, if you’re wondering why I don’t just give you a pen, it’s because the internet said that was the least effective way to communicate with a ghost. I think it’s something about fine motor control and having to be really precise with how you manipulate the pen? Or maybe ghosts just have shitty handwriting, I don’t know. Anyway, I know you _ can _write because you did that charming Banksy on the wall, but we’ll keep that for the last resort, okay?”

_ Knock. _

“Okay.” Bucky popped open the snaps on the leather case, and Steve zoomed in for a closer look. It was a portable typewriter, one that seemed to be from slightly after his lifetime, with hard plastic keys and a garish teal body. “I would’ve liked to bring you a laptop,” Bucky explained, “but ghosts have kind of an energy field thing going on that fucks with electronics. Fried two motherboards before I figured that out. So, oldschool it is. We still gotta be careful with this thing, though; it’s not restored, so I don’t think it’s worth anything, but I did have to convince my sister’s goddamn hipster boyfriend to loan it to us, and if we break it, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

Not _ worth _anything? A machine like this might’ve cost most of a year’s salary in 1946. Steve didn’t think lack of caution would be an issue. He watched with fascination as Bucky slid a sheet of paper behind a roller and turned a knob to bring it to the front. “There you go,” he said, “go wild,” and moved aside, leaning against the futon with his coffee cup in hand.

Steve approached the keyboard tentatively, looking at it for a long moment before he pushed the first key, and started when a metal bar clapped against the paper. He got more confident as he went, though, and Bucky was maybe halfway through the coffee when he hit the carriage return, sounding a loud _ ding! _to announce that he was finished.

Bucky leaned forward. “Okay,” he said, in a tone that was clearly supposed to sound bored but wasn’t doing much to hide his interest. “Let’s see what you’ve got.” He scrolled the paper up and read Steve’s first attempt at friendly communication with a living being in decades:

who the fuvck putthese keys in ordrer/?

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t exactly what a person would expect in a missive from the afterlife, but it also wasn’t _ that _funny. There was no reason for Bucky to laugh at it as hard as he did, which was why Steve finally got aggravated enough to nudge his injured shoulder. “Ow, fuck, okay,” he said, clearly forcing himself to stop laughing only with a tremendous effort. “You’ve seriously never used a keyboard before? Like, not ever?”

wasn;t rich, Steve responded, and then, after some consideration, dumb ass.

That set Bucky off again, which was infuriating, but Steve waited him out this time, and eventually he calmed down. “So I think what we’ve learned from this,” he said, “is that typing isn’t really your thing. We can work on it, but considering we just spent ten minutes on twelve words and two of them were swears, I think we can do better. Come on,” he said, and led the way into the kitchen.

The old refrigerator, circa 1980, had been removed right at the start of the renovation, but Bucky had hauled in a mini-fridge for lunches and coffee creamer. Steve had unplugged it every night, obviously, but Bucky was wise to that trick and hadn’t left anything in it long enough to spoil. Now Bucky sat in front of it and opened a tin that was full of… Steve squinted… small, rectangular white magnets with words on them. Bucky was sticking them all over the side of the fridge, leaving the door clear. “It’s called magnetic poetry. I thought it might be faster, once we get it set up,” he said, but Steve was already reaching for the words he wanted. 

[**don’t** ] [ **go** ] [ **up**]

“...What?” Bucky said, squinting at the words. “Don’t go up _ what?” _

If he’d had lungs, he would have sighed. As it was, Steve just knocked the words off the fridge—Bucky had been right; they were light and easier to manipulate than either a pen or the keys of the typewriter—and stuck them to the metal again, this time vertically, for emphasis: 

[**don’t**]

[**go**]

[**up**]

“Hate to break it to you, buddy, but saying the same thing again louder doesn’t make it any easier for me to understand,” Bucky said, and Steve really did try to groan, this time, before he remembered the whole disembodied thing. Of course _ stairs _hadn’t been included in what seemed like a truly random assortment of words, because nothing could ever be easy.

“Wait, do you mean up like uptown, or up like in a plane, or up like upstairs?” Bucky asked, and just as quickly corrected himself, proving that he wasn’t a total idiot: “One knock if you mean upstairs in this house, specifically,” he said, and Steve knocked once, almost limp with relief.

“Shit, is that what you’ve been doing all this time? Trying to keep me from renovating the upstairs? _ Why?” _Bucky asked, and right away, Steve was back to wanting to tear his nonexistent hair in frustration. He grabbed another batch of magnets and flung them at the door:

[**run** ] [ **scream** ] [ **death**]

[**I** ] [ **am** ] [ **try** ] [ **ing** ] [ **to**]

[**save** ] [ **you**]

[**you** ] [ **stupid** ] [ **skin** ] [ **sausage**]

“...What the _ fuck,” _Bucky said, and then, almost immediately afterward, “Oh, fuck me,” because Natasha had just thrown open the kitchen door.

_ “Barnes!” _ she shouted, storming in. “What in _ fuck _are you doing here?”

“Driving our ratings off the charts, for one thing,” Bucky began, with barely a tinge of panic in his voice, which was fairly impressive under the force of Natasha’s glare. “I’m talking to the ghost, Nat, and he says—”

“I don’t care if he says he’s George Fucking Washington, _ you’re _supposed to be staying safe, you—” She spat out a string of Russian, which Steve didn’t understand, but whether Bucky did or not, he was carefully avoiding eye contact. “Go home,” she finished.

“Nat, I—”

“You want us to lose our insurance on this property? You want this whole project to fail? Because if you get hurt again, that’s what happens, James Buchanan. So go. The fuck. _ Home.” _

“I am having a _ conversation _with the ghost, and he is about to tell me what he’s so pissed off about,” Bucky said evenly.

Natasha stared into his face. “You’re completely hopped up on coffee and codeine, aren’t you?”

“So what? Look at the fridge! He doesn’t want us to go upst—_ ow ow ow, _okay, I’ll go home, all right? But it’s a big mistake to make me leave when I’ve finally got this stubborn asshole talking, Nat.”

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take. And _ you,” _ Natasha addressed the open air, “I’m warning you now, if you hurt my friend again, or _ any _ of the workers I bring into this house, I will _ find a way _ to hit you so hard that you’ll feel it in the afterlife, _ ty ponimayesh'?” _

Steve was, in fact, feeling pretty stupid about not noticing that Bucky was in absolutely no condition to be here. He knocked once on the floor, resignedly. “That means yes,” Bucky said, but Natasha didn’t look pacified as she grabbed Bucky by his good arm and hauled him out of the house, barely stopping to retrieve his coat before they were gone.

Still feeling a little guilty—but also plenty annoyed; Natasha’s heart was in the right place, but she was only further endangering them all by not letting him explain—Steve drifted back to the living room, figuring that as long as he was alone here, he might as well start teaching himself to type. Some of the young women who’d come through the boarding house when he was alive had taken typewriting correspondence courses, and one of them had claimed she could type thirty words a minute, so it couldn’t be as hard as it looked. Then his gaze fell on Bucky’s backpack, which was still sitting, half-open and forgotten, beside the futon. Not for the first time, Steve wished he could operate one of those cellular phones; it would be a shame if Bucky had to come back for it and they wound up paying the subway fare twice. Still, he was curious about what else Bucky might have had on the docket for him to try. One little peek couldn’t hurt.

In the backpack, he found treasure. Not the kind that anybody would recognize as treasure except him, maybe. But in addition to the sheaf of blank paper that was sized for the typewriter, Bucky had brought him a sketchpad with the kind of smooth, heavy paper he’d dreamed of being able to buy when he was an art student, and a case of thick-tipped pens that had _ Sharpie _written on the side and smelled like alcohol solvent when he uncapped them. How he could smell things, without a body, he’d no more figured out than how he could see and hear things; all he knew was that these would’ve set off his asthma the way some paints had when he was alive, but now, he could draw with these all day.

He didn’t start with the sketch pad, though. He had a bigger idea than that.

When Wanda knocked on her office door, Natasha was simultaneously rendering video for this week’s show on her Macbook, grading essays on her vastly inferior work computer, and trying to ignore the scratchy feeling in her throat and the headache that had settled in between her eyes sometime between getting the video security notification on her phone and dragging Bucky out of the Vinegar Hill house. “I was going to ask you if you wanted to go down to the coffee cart,” Wanda said, squeezing between two piles of books and sliding into the spare chair for advisees, “but you look like you might fall over if you stand up. Are you getting sick?”

Natasha had to consciously stop herself from shooting back one of her well-rehearsed lies. In the Rushman family, illness wasn’t just a weakness, it was a moral failing; once she’d almost collapsed onstage from appendicitis because that seemed preferable to missing a ballet recital. “I hope not,” she said. “I don’t have time to get whatever death plague the students brought in this year. I’m a week behind on grading, and I really need to go back and interview a source again.”

“For the thesis or the side project?” 

It was a simple question, perfectly innocent, and Natasha couldn’t think of any reason not to answer it besides the fact that her instincts rebelled against answering any question honestly. “Maybe both,” she said, “maybe neither. It’s just a lead. I’ll see where it goes.”

For a second, she thought she saw that look in Wanda’s eyes again—the one that meant she wanted to say something, but was holding back. She was going to need a better poker face if she wanted to survive staff meetings. But whatever she’d been thinking, what she said was, “I can help with the grading, if you want. Or at least bring you something from the coffee cart.”

“No, you have enough to do. I think I’ll head home early, finish this up from there.” So she was turning out to be capable of minimum self-care after all. _ Take that, Rushmans, one of us is almost behaving like a sensible human. _

“Oh.” If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought Wanda actually looked disappointed at not having to fetch a random adjunct’s coffee. “Well, you can always call me if you need anything.”

“Thanks.” She wouldn’t, but it was a kind gesture.

It was a good thing Wanda had checked in when she did, because by the time Natasha got home, she was sniffling enough that several people on the subway had actually noticed and glared at her. Usually the best thing about New York was how easy it was to be anonymous; with so many people crammed into such a small area, most people found that the only way to cope was to exist inside their own personal privacy bubble as much as possible. After the constant scrutiny of her upbringing, it had been a tremendous relief to realize that in New York, she could do pretty much whatever she wanted and nobody would give a shit as long as she wasn’t blocking the sidewalk.

Her apartment was tiny—her adoptive parents, who vacationed in bigger hotel suites, would be horrified—but it was hers, and she always felt a sense of relief when she stepped inside and deadbolted the door behind her. She kicked off her shoes and walked through the aggressively neutral living room, all whites and grays except the splash-of-color throw pillows and a generic oil painting of flowers on the wall, and past the kitchen, which was sleek and modern and gleaming, to the bedroom. She could only afford the place to herself through a quasi-legal sublet, but she suspected she only had a passport because her parents had spent a lot of money to cover up a quasi-legal adoption, so staying under the legal radar wasn’t anything new. And anyway, it was worth a little hassle to have a bedroom with a door that shut. On the rare occasions when she brought somebody home, anything that happened, happened on the couch; even Bucky had only been in her bedroom once, when he was helping her move in. The rest of the apartment belonged to Natalie Rushman, but her bedroom was the one place where she didn’t have to be anybody but herself.

...A self that now felt _ like crap, _as Bucky would say. She flopped down on the bed, tossing the laptop case down beside her, and reached for her phone. “Hey,” she said, when Bucky picked up. “The new episode’s ready. Want to watch it before I upload it?”

“Nat?” he said, sounding surprised, as if he didn’t have caller ID. “I… nah, go ahead and queue it, I trust you not to make me look any dumber in the final edit than I actually am. You okay? You sound—”

“Awful, I know. I have the plague that’s going around. College students are disgusting and the whole campus should be cleansed with fire.”

“Careful. It’s talk like that that’ll get you tenure. You want me to come over and keep you company? We could hate-watch _ Anastasia _again.”

“Once wasn’t enough?” He was baiting her, but she couldn’t help herself: “I don’t know what’s worse, the students who come in thinking they know the real story from the movie, or the ones who are surprised it’s based on real people.” 

“Aw, but it was so cool when Rasputin was a zombie and stuff.”

“James.”

“Have you heard? There’s a rumor in St. Petersburg—” 

_ “James,” _ Natasha said, trying not to laugh. “You’re not at work. You can turn off the asshole persona.”

“If only. Seriously, Nat, I’ll come hang out with you if you want.”

First Wanda, now Bucky? Why had all her friends suddenly decided she was so incompetent? “Thank you, James, but I think I can take care of myself.”

“How many times do I have to tell you that’s not the point? The point is, you don’t _ have _t—you know what? I’m not having this argument again. Let me know if you change your mind and want me to bring you soup or something.”

“All I want you to do is tell me you found an electrician to come in this week so we don’t get any further off schedule.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “I’m borrowing a guy off my uncle’s crew for a couple days. He does good work, I trust him.”

“Did you warn him about the ghost?”

Bucky laughed. “Yes, and trust me, after him, the ghost is gonna think maybe I’m not so bad after all.”

“You do remember that we’re trying to get the ghost _ out _of the house, don’t you? Not adopt it as a pet.”

“I know. It’s just… There’s something about this one that doesn’t feel like a regular job, you know? Even the ladder thing, it didn’t feel malicious to me. It feels like there’s something else going on. You’re getting that too, right?”

She barely let herself hesitate. “Maybe.”

“Knew it.”

“Don’t get a big head. There’s nothing to do about it tonight, anyway. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” 

Natasha hung up the phone and lay back on the bed, arms behind her head, staring up at the ceiling. Bucky wasn’t wrong that the whole situation felt a little off, but it wasn’t the ghost that bothered her. It was Carter, and the way she’d reminisced about Zimmerman. It hadn’t been unmixed lies, but it hadn’t been all true, either. So what the hell did a woman at the end of her life have to gain by hiding something that happened seven decades ago?

A sensible person would’ve let the whole thing go and jumped back into the grading she’d left half-finished… Okay, a sensible person would’ve decided to get some sleep and come back to it fresh; a Rushman would still be on campus, feeling both utterly miserable and virtuous about having a strong work ethic. The fact that Natasha was neither was a mixed blessing sometimes. But this was going to nag at her until she got to the bottom of it. 

Well, she taped interviews for a reason, didn’t she? She reached for her computer, found the file she’d downloaded, and skimmed forward until she got to the relevant audio. “Sarah Roth died years before I moved in, I’m afraid,” Carter’s voice informed her, “and I only knew Mr. Zimmerman in passing. He was Swiss, you know, and quite impressively intelligent—one of many scientists who defected during the War. People said he did experiments for the Nazis, terrible things, but—”

Natasha paused the audio. She’d thought it was the mention of Nazis that had set off the warning bells, but it was something before that. She skipped back.

“—afraid, and I only knew Mr. Zimmerman in passing. He was Swiss, you know, and quite—”

She paused it again, more certain and more frustrated at the same time. It was there. It was definitely there. She was never that far off base about these things.

“—only knew Mr. Zimmerman in passing. He was Swiss, you know, and quite impressively—”

Natasha shook her head in frustration, stopped the recording, and logged back into her work email to shoot her students a quick note cancelling tomorrow’s classes. It wasn’t going to cause any widespread mourning if a bunch of freshmen didn’t learn about the Hungarian Uprising until next week. And then she stopped, with her finger paused over the R key, because everything had just slotted into place.

She’d been going back and forth between the worlds of Natasha Romanov and Natalie Rushman for so long that having two identities was practically second nature. But sometimes—not often, but more so when she was tired or having a hard time concentrating—something about the muscle memory in her typing fingers would get tangled up, and she’d have to consciously remember which name she needed to apply. The other situation where it came out was when she introduced herself. It was just a little hitch, a microsecond of uncertainty; something that, as far as she knew, no one else had ever noticed. But it was the same thing Carter had done when she said Zimmerman’s name. 

The practice of anglicization certainly hadn’t started with the Rushmans stripping her of her too-Russian-for-small-town-Vermont name; it had been common for decades in the United States, not least among Germans who wanted to distance themselves from not one but two world wars. In the historical record, Schmidts became Smiths and Weiskopfs became Whiteheads often enough to make amateur genealogists weep, just for the relatively benign motive of wanting to fit in. But if that was Zimmerman’s intent, he could have gone all the way and become a Jones or something, and he hadn’t. What if he’d been hiding something else, and Carter was now hiding it as well? 

It was too thin to be called evidence, or even an educated guess. But it was a hunch, and Natasha had learned not to ignore those before she was out of the orphanage in Vladivostok. She didn’t know where to start yet, but she knew it was only a matter of time until she figured it out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This American Thanksgiving weekend, I am thankful for [robyngoodfellow,](https://archiveofourown.org/users/robyngoodfellow/) who came up with Steve's magnetic poem, and [beradan,](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beradan) who puts up with me texting random nonsense about Rasputin after midnight.


	6. Team Meetings

“So what’s the plan for today?” Clint asked, eyeing the low, flat box Bucky had handed him with vague suspicion. “String up some Christmas lights on the wall and Stranger Things this bitch?” 

“Yeah, I could spend the morning doing that one-handed and then watch the whole string short out the first time our buddy Steve got near it, or,” said Bucky, “I could use a low-tech, hard-to-break ghost-talking-to device that’s been around for a hundred years or so. Behold,” he said, tapping the box’s lid, “the Ouija board. Now, normally at this point I remind our viewers that we’re professionals and you shouldn’t try this shit at home. Now, my partner Natasha is taking today off, and Clint here is _ not _a professional, except maybe a professional idiot—”

“You suck, Barnes.” 

“—But I feel pretty confident that we’re gonna be okay, because we’re not just reaching out into the general supernatural world here, which is where people get in trouble. You should never, _ ever _just issue an open invitation to whatever supernatural shit happens to be passing by—”

“That’s how you get demons?”

“That’s how you get demons, which are way the fuck above my pay grade. But we’re not inviting in anything that isn’t already here; we’re contacting a specific ghost to find out more details about why he’s so dead set, pun intended, against moving on to the afterlife. So, you ready to give this a spin?”

“Eh, why not? It’s only a little mortal peril, and you offered me three hundred bucks for the day. Who could possibly turn down an offer like that?”

“That’s the spirit. Again, pun very much intended. Okay,” Bucky said, turning the key and opening the door to the house. “Let’s go.”

He left the outside camera rolling, and he’d already turned on the inside cameras remotely so they’d catch his entrance, because Natasha loved her reaction shots. When he stopped just through the doorway, so suddenly that Clint bumped into him and almost dropped all the shit he was carrying, his first thought was that she was gonna get a hell of a one out of this.

The walls, which Bucky had patched where he could, replaced the drywall where he couldn’t, and skim-coated with plaster but not yet primed or painted, were covered in ink drawings. The faint smell of Sharpie markers still lingered in the air, which explained the source of the… He couldn’t quite call it vandalism, because it was gorgeous. Bucky knew fuck-all about art, but he could see that with the limitations of the markers, Steve had had to do some fancy things with line weight and cross-hatching to get the effects he wanted. But as technically skillful as the pictures were, the more fascinating part was that they told a story.

They started to the left of the front door and wound around the room in chronological order: a man in a soldier’s uniform that looked about right for World War I, whose face was a barely sketched blur, followed by a blonde woman in clothes that Bucky inexpertly judged to be from the 1920s, holding a baby while she stood over a white cross like the ones in the poem about Flanders Fields. The same woman chasing a boy, small and cartoonishly thin, with a medicine bottle in one hand and a spoon in the other. In the next image, the boy was a lanky schoolchild in ill-fitting clothes, fists raised, looking ready to fight three looming shadows that surrounded him in what was recognizably a Brooklyn alley, complete with the pile of trash and old car tires in the corner. The boy was rescued in the next scene by another kid, taller and distinctly pudgy—at least, that was what Bucky got out of the way he was holding out his hand to the smaller one, as if to help him up. This drawing had a label: the pudgy kid was marked _ Arnie Roth. _

Rounding the corner to the next wall, there was an abrupt tonal shift in the drawings: the blonde woman lying in a hospital bed, the boy distraught in a way that would have been obvious from his face and posture, even without the thought bubble containing two jagged halves of a broken heart. In the next scene, the woman was up again, thinner and with a deeply shadowed face, in a plain dress, but wearing a bridal veil and carrying a handful of cut flowers, being escorted up the steps of— 

“Hey,” Clint said, finally breaking the silence. “It’s here.”

“Yeah.” —Escorted up the same steps Bucky had just taken, by a man who resembled Arnie and was duly labeled _ Harold Roth, _who Bucky remembered as the owner of the property back when it was a boarding house. The marriage hadn’t lasted long; the next drawing mirrored the first, with the skinny kid, slightly taller but still just as gawky and awkward, standing over a fresh gravestone beside the cross, head drooping, with a smaller and sadder bunch of the same flowers in his hand. “Jesus,” Bucky muttered; even roughly rendered in thick-tipped markers, the pain in the image was palpable.

The next couple of images were better suited to the capability of the Sharpies: bold, thick lines with a distinctly 1940s propaganda-poster style. A flight of planes overhead in silhouette; that famous newspaper with the headline that just read **WAR!**; Arnie again, in a Navy uniform, walking up the gangplank of a ship, while Steve—no longer a teenager, Bucky thought, but still no taller or bulkier—stood at the edge of the dock, glumly holding a piece of paper that just said **4F. **“I take it this means Uncle Sam didn’t want you,” he said, mostly as a test to see if Steve was watching them. Evidently he was, because something that felt suspiciously like a fist connected with his right shoulder blade. “Ow, jeez,” he said, and glanced quickly over a series of smaller images: Steve in a factory, assembling mechanical parts; Steve in a movie theater, watching a newsreel of marching Nazi soldiers; assorted scenes of daily wartime life that, Bucky noticed, seemed to have only one unifying theme: Steve was always alone. 

“You really had a hard time after your mom died, didn’t you,” Bucky said softly. Yeah, he knew that kind of grief. But he’d had people to help him through it, when it happened to him: his sisters, his aunt, a couple of good friends who’d been tolerant of him when he was at peak teen asshole. Steve had had a friend turned stepbrother who went off to war—not his fault, obviously, but feelings weren’t reasonable, and it must have felt like abandonment—and a stepfather who’d fallen out of the story almost as soon as he was in it. That wasn’t a lot to build a life on.

There was a short silence, and then Steve knocked: once for yes, somewhere on the wall behind him.

“You know,” Bucky said, “I’m sort of obligated to say at this point that if you moved on, you might find your mom waiting for you. I mean, I’m not claiming to know anything about religion here, but I don’t think you’re scared of whatever’s next. You don’t seem like the type. So why not go, take your chance on seeing her again?”

Steve answered with a few short taps on the wall to Bucky’s right, and he turned to see what he’d missed.

The art so far had been in black Sharpie over the dull plaster skimcoat; this one, a drawing of a woman walking through the door of the boarding house, was the first one that had splashes of color. _ Peggy, _Steve had written over her head. He hadn’t had a lot to work with, but he’d made the most of the markers yet again, using the blue marker for the coat she was wearing and the red one for her lipstick. The same red had been used to color a blush on Steve’s cheeks. In the drawing, he was gazing at her from across an antiquated parlor that matched the floor plan of the room they were in, with the stairs leading up in the corner and the little diamond accent window on the staircase. Other people were seated on old-fashioned couches—Harold Roth, a couple of fairly anonymous young women and one older man, round-faced, with glasses and a shifty expression—but they were sketched quickly, as afterthoughts; it was clear that all of the focus was meant to be on Peggy. And in the next drawing, the last drawing, she and Steve were walking by the river, with the long span of the Brooklyn Bridge above them rendered in loving architectural detail. Peggy, wearing a red hat and a dress that hinted at some really spectacular curves, was holding hands with a Steve who, while no less skinny and ungainly than the previous drawings, looked transformed. He was smiling for the first time, and over his head was a heart, still cracked down the middle but back in one piece, with a string wrapped around it in such a way that it lashed the two halves together.

“So what happened next?” Bucky asked, and then he said, “Shit,” because over the heads of both figures was written, simply, _ 1946, _the year Steve’s obituary said he’d died.

“Aw, hell,” he said, and turned away from all of the cameras for a second. Nat wouldn’t like that, but he wasn’t particularly interested in choking up onscreen. “Okay,” he said, when he was reasonably sure his voice wouldn’t break. “Wow. This is a lot. I’m gonna get some photos of this and send them to Natasha, if that’s okay with you—” He wasn’t surprised when two knocks followed—“And I’m gonna have some questions for you later, assuming you’re feeling up to it and not back in your bodily-harm phase. But right now, I’ve gotta get a couple things moved, because the electrician is supposed to be here in about a minute, and I—”

“Yo, somebody say electrician?” a cheerful voice called from the kitchen. 

Bucky turned, relief flooding him now that he had an excuse to take a break from all these fucking _ feelings. _“Hey, Luis,” he shouted back. “Perfect timing. Come in here, I got something to show you that I think you’re gonna really like.”

Luis came in, grinning broadly, and dropped a toolbox hard enough to make Bucky cringe on behalf of the newly restored hardwood. “Eyyy, Bucky, what’s the—_whoa,” _ he said, taking in the drawings. “Your ghost do all this?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “Hey, Steve, meet my buddy Luis. He’s a good guy, and I don’t want you giving him any grief. You got a problem with him, you take it up with me. You got that?”

Steve knocked once, and Luis jumped. “Whoa,” he repeated, “you were serious, you got a ghost in here for real, man!”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “You gonna be okay working with him here? Because I think he’s over any bullshit where he might try to hurt you, but we can’t really make him go away.”

Luis grinned. “Oh, no,” he began excitedly, “a ghost isn't gonna be any problem for me, ’cause, see, I know exactly how to deal with ghosts. This one time, when I was on vacation with my cousin Ignacio, we went to this haunted cathedral where they had these frescos that were just brilliant, you know, and these tessellated floors, most people call them mosaics, anyway, the colors were amazing, I’m pretty sure they were replicas, but Ignacio said his sister’s husband’s cousin says they’re real—”

“Yeah, Luis, I gotta go take care of a couple things, so you’re gonna have to tell me later, okay?” Bucky paused and, after a second’s consideration, delivered one more small, but precisely executed, act of revenge against Steve for the ladder business: “But Steve seems real interested in art, and he hasn’t really gotten out of the house much since the 1940s. Why don’t you tell him about the postmodernist movement?”

Luis was a good guy, and Bucky really did like him a lot, but there were limits, so he retreated to the kitchen before Luis could get going again, motioning for Clint to follow. An hour or two of Luis had a way of making people desperate just to get a word in edgewise. If that didn’t guarantee that Steve would answer any question they put to him, nothing would.

When someone knocked on Natasha’s apartment door, she almost didn’t get up to answer it. Bucky wouldn’t come by without texting first, and her family made visits into such a production that they couldn’t _ not _give her days, if not weeks, of warning before setting foot in Brooklyn. But on the off chance it was a neighbor or a delivery, she sighed, hauled herself up, and opened it to find the last person she’d expected standing on her doorstep.

“Hi,” said Wanda Maximoff. “Can I come in? I brought you some soup.”

“That depends on how much you’ll mind if I sneeze on you,” Natasha said, her voice a flat croak. But Wanda laughed, even though she wasn’t really joking, and without knowing quite how it happened, Natasha had stepped aside to let her in. “How did you know where I live?”

“Department Christmas card list.” Wanda set a brown paper bag on the kitchen island. “I got worried when you didn’t show up for work today. Nobody remembers you ever taking three days off in a row before. So I came to check on you.”

“Why didn’t you just text me?”

“Because you would have told me to stay away. Then I still would’ve been worried about you and I couldn’t have invited myself in and asked if you wanted company.”

Natasha actually laughed at that, sore throat notwithstanding. “Well, I wouldn’t say no. You really should stay away from me, though. I’d hate for you to catch this.” The soup in the plastic container was chicken noodle, and it smelled amazing. She reached for a ladle, and Wanda leaned past her and took it. 

“Go sit down. I’ll heat up a bowl for you.”

“You really don’t have to—” 

“Natalie,” Wanda said patiently, “this is what friends do for each other.”

“Is it? I guess I’m a little out of practice.”

“Who would have imagined,” Wanda said dryly. “Now go, sit,” she said, making a shooing motion, and Natasha, amused, returned to her blanket nest on the sofa. She hadn’t stayed in bed because she didn’t want to risk falling asleep until she’d made some progress, and now she was glad, because when she tucked her feet up under her, there was room for Wanda to sit beside her and hand her the bowl. “This can’t all be for grading,” she said, picking a worn book out of the explosion of reference material covering the coffee table. “World War II? This isn’t your usual area. Side hustle?”

“Side hustle,” Natasha confirmed. “Where did you get this soup? It’s amazing.”

“It’s my mother’s recipe.”

“This is homemade? Hold on, I have to call my former best friend and tell him he’s fired.”

Wanda had a great laugh, rich and throaty, and Natasha vaguely wondered why it had taken her so long to notice it. Especially since Wanda seemed to be one of two people on the planet, the other being Bucky, who actually thought her terrible jokes were funny. “So what are you trying to find out about the war? Maybe I can help.”

Maybe she could, come to think of it. Natasha was so used to going it alone that it wouldn’t have occurred to her to ask, but Wanda was a hell of a researcher. “Not the war so much,” she said, “but immigration immediately after the war. There’s one person, specifically, who I’m trying to backtrack to where he came from, and I’m not even sure I have his real name. I know what he was calling himself in New York, but I don’t have a record of anyone with that name getting off a boat here, much less getting on one in Europe.”

Wanda leaned forward, apparently having forgotten all about keeping her distance. “How much do you know?”

“Swiss, going by the name Aaron Zimmerman, a scientist, possibly had a doctorate, lived in Vinegar Hill after immigrating. No birth date. Died in March 1946 of a heart attack or a stroke, which I’m guessing—but only guessing—puts his birth around or before the turn of the century.” 

“You don’t ask for much, do you? Where have you already looked?”

“Every digitized immigration archive from 1939 to 1946. A couple of Zimmermans popped, but I cross-referenced the dates of death and they were all years after the right timeframe. Beyond that, he lived in a boarding house, so there are no property records; he died before the 1950 census; and his death notice in the newspaper was pretty clearly written by someone who didn’t know any more than I do. So I’m stuck. Any ideas?”

Wanda thought about it for a moment, while Natasha fished for the last noodle in the soup bowl. Then she said, “What kind of scientist?”

Natasha raised an eyebrow at her. “You have an idea.”

“How much do you know about Operation Paperclip?”

“Less than Actually Daniel, I’m sure,” Natasha said, which got another undeserved laugh out of Wanda. “That was the one where the Allies recruited rocket scientists from the Third Reich, wasn’t it? That’s how the U.S. got Wehrner von Braun. But what…” She stopped. “You think Zimmerman could have been one of them?”

“The OSS wasn’t supposed to take any former Nazi Party members,” Wanda said, “but there were a few who were considered strategic enough recruits that they whitewashed the records—”

“—And if they were too well known, maybe they changed a few names.” Natasha grabbed her laptop and started typing furiously. “Hell,” she said, a moment later. “There’s no roster of Paperclip recruits on either Wikipedia or JSTOR.”

“You could always put in a FOIA act,” Wanda said. “It might take a while, though.”

Natasha gave her a grin with a lot of teeth in it. “Turn around,” she said.

“...Why?”

“Are you familiar with the Ten Duel Commandments from the musical _ Hamilton?” _

“No.”

“No reason, then.” A few minutes later, she said, “There. You can look again,” and showed Wanda the roster of known or suspected Operation Paperclip scientists on her screen. “Amazing how fast a FOIA request can go through sometimes, these days.”

Wanda shook her head. “You’re wasted in the history department, Natalie.” 

“Thanks, but this is your win. I’ve been staring at this project for three days, and in two minutes you cracked it wide open.”

“We haven’t found him yet. What are you doing now?”

“There are about sixteen hundred people on the list. I’m writing an algorithm to crawl the internet and match those names to known dates of death, then throw out any with a death record after 1950. That should narrow it down to only a handful I have to look at more closely.” She hit Enter, then sat back. “It’ll take a while to run.”

“Oh, will it,” Wanda said dryly. “What should we do in the meantime?”

Natasha blinked. “What do you suggest?”

“Well, some people, when they’re sick, like to curl up in bed and watch a movie.”

“There’s no TV in the bedroom,” Natasha said, quickly enough that Wanda looked slightly stung. “…I wouldn’t object to watching a movie on the couch, though. Have something in mind?”

“I brought my favorite.” Wanda reached into her backpack and pulled out a DVD. _ “The Princess Bride. _Have you seen it?”

Natasha couldn’t stop herself from laughing. “Only about ninety times. It’s my friend Bucky’s favorite, too. No, go ahead and put it on,” she said, as Wanda started to shove it back into the bag. “Just don’t ever tell him I watched this movie voluntarily. Giving him grief is one of the few small joys of my existence.”

“You need more joys,” Wanda told her. “Can I get you anything before we start?”

“It’s my apartment. I should be offering you—”

“No, you’re sick. Let me take care of you, Natalie,” Wanda said, and then looked down, like she was afraid she’d overstepped. 

That was… interesting. Wanda wasn’t exactly brash, but she was confident, a trait that was serving her well in academia, and it was rare to see her look uncertain. Maybe even… embarrassed? “Well,” Natasha said, relenting, “if you really insist on spoiling me, I’ll take a cup of tea.”

“I don’t mind at all,” Wanda said, getting up.

“Use the loose-leaf, though, not the bags. I only keep those for my friend, because he doesn’t appreciate nice things.”

“Okay.” 

“With lemon and sugar, please.”

“Okay.”

“Let it steep for about four minutes.”

“Okay.”

“And warm up the kettle before you put the hot water in.”

Wanda poked her head through the kitchen doorway. “Natalie,” she said, “has anybody ever told you that you’re kind of a diva when you’re sick?”

“Nice of you to assume it’s only when I’m sick.” Natasha hesitated, then took the plunge. “And Wanda?”

“Yes?” Wanda said wearily.

“My friends call me Natasha.”

Wanda disappeared back into the kitchen without further comment, but not quickly enough that Natasha didn’t see her cheeks suddenly flame red. That was… unexpected. And coming on the heels of the earlier look, it was… She shook her head. _ Imagining things, _ she thought. _ Silly. _

A motion on the computer screen caught her eye, and she leaned closer to see that the completion message had popped up. It had taken less time than she’d guessed, but then, she was good at this—very, very good. From sixteen hundred results, the algorithm had narrowed it down to four. She pulled up the results in a text file, and one of the results leaped out at her immediately. The dates were spot-on, _ b. 1897 d. 1946, _ but more than that, the initials matched. “Wanda?” she called, trying not to sound too urgent; the man had been dead for well over seventy years, after all. But this was the part that never got old. Sure, searching for a very particular set of results had gotten her into the history program, but the thrill of discovery had been the thing that kept her going through long nights and eyestrain and delving into archived paper files where she’d found nothing but indecipherable handwriting, disintegrated rubber bands, and the occasional cockroach. 

“Yes?” Wanda replied, leaning through the door again.

“Have you ever heard of a Nazi scientist named Arnim Zola?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm no computer programmer, but algorithms are magic. Marvel says so.
> 
> I'm also no archivist or research specialist, but hero beta reader Beradan is, and her input vastly improved this chapter; any remaining mistakes are solely my own.


	7. Unforeseen Circumstances

“So that backfired,” Bucky told Natasha on the phone, after he saw Luis out of the house. “The electrical work’s done, but the ghost is refusing to answer any questions until I bring him a bunch of books about everything that’s happened in the art world since 1946.”

Natasha laughed. She still sounded wretchedly ill, but since she was apparently in reasonably good spirits, he felt a little less guilty about not having stopped by to check on her in person. “What does he want specifically?” she asked.

“He gave me a list of the stuff Luis told him about that he thought sounded interesting. I got it here: Pollock, Rothko, Lichtenstein, Warhol, something called Arte Povera, neo-expressionism in general, Basquiat, and Banksy. His exact words were, ‘For a start.’”

“Our ghost has interesting taste,” Natasha mused. “Very populist. All male, but I suppose I can’t blame him or Luis for the amount of sexism in fine art in general. Throw in some late Georgia O’Keefe, at least—the Southwest series, not the flowers—and tell him I’ll want his thoughts next time I visit. Oh, and I’m going to email you a list of books to pick up for me while you’re at the library. I was going to ask Wanda, but she’s out picking up dinner.”

“Wait, Wanda’s there? Cute TA Wanda who has a crush on you?”

“What makes you say that?” Natasha said, with enough sharp edges in her voice to make Bucky stop and assess the situation. Normally, whenever he observed that some attractive person was checking her out, her response was to shrug it off if she believed him and ignore him entirely if she didn’t. 

“I have eyes, Natalia,” he said, figuring it was a reasonably neutral response.

“I wasn’t asking why you called her cute.”

“I know. Also, she’s apparently hanging out at your place and fetching you food when you sound like shit, which, I guess there are people in the world who’d do that for a random coworker if they didn’t want to get in their pants, but I’m not one of ’em. Speaking of which, I’m not gonna carry books for you _ and _the ghost with a fucking broken arm. Wait a couple days and get ’em yourself.”

“If that’s how little you care about me,” Natasha said, and coughed, delicately.

“Oh my God, I hate you so much. I’ll be over in a couple hours,” Bucky said, and hung up before he realized how neatly she’d distracted him from following up on the Wanda thing. There really was no beating Natasha at her own game. “Hey, ghost, Nat says your list is a sausage fest,” he called to the open air, looking up at the ceiling, even though he was pretty sure Steve had just lurked his way through the kitchen door. It was weird; he still didn’t think he had a psychically sensitive bone in his body, but he could swear he was almost seeing a shimmer in the air now and then, especially when Steve moved from one place to another. Either he was starting to get better attuned to ghosts in general—which would have upsides and downsides, in his line of work—or he’d hit his head harder than anybody thought when he fell off the ladder.

There was a rap on the overturned storage bin, which Bucky took as an indication that Steve wanted his attention _ again, _as if he hadn’t just spent fifteen minutes taking dictation of the dead jerk’s reading list. With a deeply resigned sigh, Bucky sat down on the futon. “Yeah? Whatcha got?” he asked, turning his attention to the Ouija board on its makeshift table.

The Ouija board was a goddamn work of art, if Bucky did say so himself. He'd bought a plastic glow-in-the-dark board, circa 1980 and missing its planchette, on eBay for a dollar plus shipping, then given it to his youngest sister to decorate with Lisa Frank stickers. There was a purple kitten stuck over the traditional image of the sun beside the word YES and a smiling dolphin with its tail obscuring half of the Q. It didn't come up often, but when it did, Bucky had, more than once, seen a ghost start to move the mismatched replacement planchette toward the Q, pause for a long moment, and then knock it off the board in disgust like a cat batting a glass off a table. Steve was also giving off contemptuous vibes, but he’d apparently lost a battle with himself about using something so unrelentingly tacky versus not being able to make his feelings known at all.

Under ordinary circumstances, you were supposed to be touching the planchette when you were trying to communicate with a ghost, but Steve had jumped right in and started moving it independently, and Bucky had to admit it was more efficient this way. HOW IS NATASHA DOING, he asked, undaunted by the lack of a question mark on the board; of course he’d completely failed to take the hint that ghosts were supposed to be giving the answers, not demanding them.

“Um, my arm that you broke is fine, thanks for asking,” Bucky said pointedly. “And Nat’s apparently feeling better, if the amount she’s bossing me around is anything to go by. I’m less worried now that I know her wannabe-girlfriend is checking in on her, though. Nat’s one of those people who forgets to take care of herself and I, unfortunately, seem to be a sucker for those people, so…” That was when he became aware that something had changed; the vibrations in the air seemed different. “Ghost? Something wrong? Talk to me, buddy.”

The planchette started to move, wobbled, stopped. Bucky had just decided it wasn’t going to move again—and he wasn’t going to try to coax it out of Steve, because it was hard enough to get Nat to use her words—when it moved again, slowly tracing out the word GIRLFRIEND, and then one of the black sharpies floated over and _ drew _the missing question mark, just so the planchette could hover over it.

Bucky took a deep breath, trying to decide how to play this. 

He’d come out to his family toward the end of high school, and while his aunt and sisters had expressed varying degrees of surprise when he told them he was bisexual, nobody was exactly _shocked _that the emo kid with the painted nails and the eyeliner might be interested in a less-than-traditional relationship. Everybody who mattered to him was pretty cool about it, and he hadn’t realized how lucky he was until the night a girl kissed Nat at a house party. He’d found her half an hour later, freaking out—for Natasha levels of freaking out—behind the garden shed, and it had taken him a while to get her to open up—again, for Natasha levels of opening up—about why it had thrown her into such a totally uncharacteristic panic. He’d never bothered to tell her he was bi because he thought she _knew; _she’d never told him she was because she’d grown up with parents who grimaced every time they saw a rainbow flag and insisted that they had nothing against _those people, _but they didn’t see why they had to shove it in everybody’s face. It was the first time Bucky had realized that knowing your childhood conditioning was fucked up didn’t make it any easier to break it. So he’d made bad jokes about how she should use her powers of bisexual invisibility for evil until she seemed steady enough to go back to the party, and she’d gone out with the girl from the party a couple times before they made a joint decision to see other people. And years later, Bucky met Wanda while swinging by Nat’s office to drop off some paperwork, saw right away that the girl was crushing hard on Nat, and personally thought they’d be great for each other, if Nat ever turned off her hyper-focus on her work for long enough to notice.

But Steve had died… what, twenty-five years before the Stonewall riots? And he’d been trapped in the house ever since, so of course he didn’t have any idea about how things had changed. Which was why it occurred to Bucky, briefly, that he _ could _play the whole thing for shock value. There were still plenty of assholes who were appalled by the entire concept of non-heterosexual people, and hell, maybe Steve would be the kind who’d rather move on to the after-afterlife than risk staining his shiny Catholic soul by association. But as soon as the idea crossed his mind, he rejected it. Nat would’ve told him to run with it, that anything that brought them closer to their goal of having a ghost-free property was a good thing, but he wasn’t going to do it by treating Nat’s sexuality as a negative. Some tricks were just too dirty, even for him.

He reached for the remote and clicked the button that turned off all the recording equipment. Nat would be pissed about that, too, of course, but this was a conversation he wanted to have in private. 

“Yeah, so,” he said slowly, taking his time, wanting to get the words right, “here’s the thing, buddy: stuff has changed kind of a lot in society since you died. I know back in your day there were really strict social norms, anti-sodomy laws, the whole deal. But nowadays we know that who you’re attracted to isn’t a choice you make, or like, a sin or anything; it’s something you’re born with. The science is pretty definitively in on that. So, the traditional one-man, one-woman romance is still the most common thing, but there’s a lot more room for people who don’t fall into that category. Me and Nat, we both identify as what’s called bisexual, which means we’re attracted to more than just one gen—_ holy fucking shit,” _he said, jolting backward and almost falling off the futon.

Steve was sitting next to him, clearly visible, as plain as day: a diminutive young man with blonde hair and blue eyes, dressed in a worn white shirt, work pants, and suspenders. Bucky’d had a general idea what he looked like from his self-portraits, but Steve had been unkind to himself in those images, drawing an exaggerated caricature of a skinny kid with a nose and ears that were too big for his face, hunched shoulders, a crooked spine. Well, sure, he was short and everything, but Bucky was pretty sure that if he’d seen this baby-faced guy in a gay bar, he definitely would’ve bought him a drink and got his flirt on. Steve had been scowling, leaning forward to grab the planchette again and, presumably, chew him out about something; he’d frozen at Bucky’s exclamation, and turned, so that their eyes abruptly met and held.

Bucky was the one who broke it off, scrambling to his feet. “Cliiiiiiiiiiiiiint,” he shouted, toward the basement stairs. 

There was a crash from somewhere below them, and Clint, who’d been put to work hauling away the broken chairs, ancient paint cans, and other junk endemic to disused basements after Luis got the light fixture working again, clomped rapidly up the stairs into the living room. “Tell me you didn’t fall off something else, Nat will kill me,” he said as he came around the corner. “Okay, no blood, this is a good start, so what happened?”

“Can you see him?” Bucky demanded. 

“Who?”

“Do you see another person in this room besides you and me?”

“No. ...Oh, shit, are you seeing the ghost right now?”

“Yes, and I’m trying to rule out concussion or sudden-onset insanity,” Bucky said grimly. “Steve, can you do something Clint would be able to see?”

Steve, whose expression was caught somewhere between anger and astonishment, looked at him hard for a moment. Then he said, “Okay,” picked up the planchette, and threw it at Bucky’s head. 

“Hey, what the fuck,” Bucky said, dodging, but Clint, despite looking a little freaked out, reached up and snatched the planchette out of the air. “This is extremely weird,” he reported, tossing the flat wooden triangle from hand to hand.

“Your face is weird,” Steve snapped, which was so unexpected that it made Bucky snort with giddy laughter. 

“What’d he say?” Clint demanded.

“You can’t hear him either?” Bucky looked pointedly at Steve and said, “He says he appreciates your contribution to science,” before taking out his cell phone and snapping a photo of the couch. “Here,” he added, passing it to Clint without looking. “Tell me if you see anything now.”

“No. …Wait, maybe. Kind of like there was a person-shaped smudge on the lens, right there? I’m gonna zoom in,” Clint said, tapping the screen.

“Let me see,” said Steve, and Bucky made a sound that definitely was not a yelp. With no transition at all, Steve had appeared at his elbow. Standing, it was apparent that Steve really was a little guy; he barely came up to Bucky’s shoulder, and he actually floated several inches off the ground to look over his arm at the phone. “Can that thing take a photograph with a longer exposure? Or can you increase the contrast when you develop it?”

“You can’t use a typewriter, but you wanna lecture me about digital cameras? Anyway, I can increase the exposure right now,” Bucky said, taking the phone back and opening the Photo Edit settings. Steve watched with interest, leaning in closer to the phone screen, and Bucky resisted the temptation to take a step back; there was a weird feeling in the air around the ghost, a kind of staticky prickling that was distinctly uncomfortable. “Damn. Yeah, I can definitely see _ something _when I do that, but it’s just sort of a blurry outline. Looks like one of those bad fakes you see going around on Reddit.”

“What’s Re—” Steve shook his head, frowning. It was a weirdly _ alive _gesture, sharp and impatient. “Never mind. Tell Clint to leave. We’re not done talking about the other thing.”

“Anybody ever tell you you’re a bossy little shit?”

“Every day of my life, pal,” said Steve, and then made a face, like he’d just realized the irony of that phrasing.

Bucky laughed again. He wasn’t actually trying to be mean, for once; he just couldn’t help it. “Okay, Clint, I think that’s enough science for now. You can go back to what you were doing. As long as the house ghost approves, I mean.”

“You shouldn’t be messing with the basement,” Steve said sharply. “You shouldn’t be messing with this _ house. _I meant it when I told you it was a mistake to be here and that you should leave before you get yourself into trouble.”

“He says it’s fine,” Bucky told Clint, who mumbled, “Yay,” but did, in fact, head back down to the basement. Which meant that now he and Ghost Steve were standing there—well, he was standing and Steve was _ appearing _to stand, a reasonably solid projection until Bucky looked closely and saw the sort of shimmery effect around his edges—in awkward silence. “So,” he said, the full weight of the situation settling over him again. “This is weird.”

“For you, maybe,” Steve said, watching him closely. Bucky couldn’t get over how _ real _ he looked; his face was doing everything a living person’s might do—narrowing his eyes, wrinkling his forehead when he frowned—but he wasn’t breathing. Bucky had never thought about how eerie that would be until he saw it, and now he couldn’t stop seeing it. “In terms of weirdness, this doesn’t really crack my top ten.”

“I guess it wouldn’t.” There were a million things Bucky wanted to ask: why had Steve stayed here when he died? Why was he still here? What else could he do, besides push over ladders and throw dead rats at people? And why was he so concerned about something upstairs, when Bucky had already assessed the bedrooms and hadn’t found anything worse than a few patches of dry rot? Something was keeping him from asking, though, and after a minute, he figured out what: he was afraid that if he pushed too hard, Steve might go away. “You have any theories on why I can see you and Clint can’t?” he asked, instead.

Steve shrugged one thin shoulder, a motion that made his incorporeal body look oddly fragile. “Whole ghost thing didn’t really come with instructions,” he said, and then he blipped back to the futon and made a little gesture like he was inviting Bucky to join him. Another time, Bucky might have snarked that it was his futon to start with, but right now, he was bemused enough to sit his ass down without further comment. “So,” he continued. “You were saying.”

“I was saying... Oh. Nat. Girlfriend. Um.”

“Queer people existing,” Steve prompted, and there was something in his tone that made Bucky look hard at him, confused—until, suddenly, he wasn’t.

“So this Peggy woman,” he began, glancing at the wall.

“She was the love of my life,” Steve said, as toneless as if he’d just said the sky was blue. “But she wasn’t the first person I ever fell for, not by a long shot. Not a lot of guys gave me the time of day, either, but sometimes I almost thought I had a chance.”

“I imagine it was pretty hard back then, though,” Bucky said, and Steve made a little sound, one that might have been a contemptuous huff if he’d had lungs to do it with.

“I don’t know what it’s like now,” he said. “I didn’t exactly get out much _ then. _ But there were places you could go where it was safe enough. That was more Arnie’s scene than mine. For one thing, it cost money. There’d be guys who’d front you the cover charge, but then they’d expect something in return, and I never wanted to feel like I owed anybody like that.”

So the ‘buy him a drink’ approach wouldn’t have worked, then. Out of habit, Bucky mentally started to file that information away before he remembered how completely irrelevant it was to this situation. “Wait, so your friend Arnie—”

“Was my friend, ever since we were little kids, but it didn’t go further than that. He was—is there a modern word like bisexual, but for the guys who only go with other men?”

“Yeah, we say they’re gay now.”

“Huh. He was gay, then, and so was his uncle Harold, the one who owned the boarding house. He kept an eye on us, knew all the places that got raided, knew the ones where the cops were getting paid off to ignore them and steered us toward those ones instead.”

“But your mom—”

“Mom knew a long time before she married him. She’d been a nurse in a TB ward, and when she got hit herself, she knew early on that she wasn’t gonna be one of the ones who came back from it. I was still a kid then, and she wanted me to have a place to go, so she made a deal with him. Marriage of convenience, I guess you’d call it. She made him a respectable married man—people liked her, and her reputation protected him, even after she died. Nobody wanted to talk bad about Nurse Roth’s widower. And he promised her he’d watch out for me, and make sure I had a place in the boarding house for as long as I needed it. She didn’t exactly mean for that to last until _ now,” _ he added wryly, “but there was no way she could’ve known what would happen.”

Bucky licked his lips and swallowed hard. “Wow,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

“No, that too, but I’m sorry I tried to, you know, bi-splain things to you. There aren’t a lot of people around who remember your era, and I know a lot of queer history got lost in the Eighties—that’s a really sad story I’ll tell you another time—but older people don’t have a real great reputation for tolerance.”

“So you thought I was shocked about Natasha because she’s with a _ woman.” _ Steve’s smile was a little lopsided, and there was no way it should have made the little crinkles around his eye that it did. “Surprise.”

“Yeah, why were you shocked, then?” 

“I didn’t understand why you were so calm about the fact that your best girl was running around on you.”

Bucky cracked up. Once again, he didn’t mean to hurt Steve’s feelings, he just couldn’t help it. “Okay, well, yeah, there are people who _ are _okay with that, believe it or not, but we can save the polyamory discussion for another day. I can’t believe you thought Nat and I were a couple, though. What did you make of the fact that we never actually kissed or anything?”

“You both knew I was here. I thought, well, public displays of affection make some people very uncomfortable.” That set Bucky off again, enough for Steve to glower at him. “Anyway, you kept calling her your _ partner.” _

_ “Business _ partner, Steve. This house is an investment for us, not a love nest. And believe me, we both need the money, which is why I wish you’d tell me why you’re so dedicated to keeping anybody from living here.”

Steve clenched his jaw, another of those oddly _ alive _gestures. “It’s safer if you don’t know,” he said, “but you should really trust me on this.”

“Sure. Give us a million dollars and we’ll be out of your hair tomorrow.”

“Hilarious. What’s the house really worth? Ten thousand? Twenty?”

“Oh, honey,” said Bucky. “Listen, rather than try to get you up to date on how much shit actually costs nowadays, let’s just say that after I get my cut of this job and pay off the debt I’m currently drowning in, I _ might _ have something left over to put toward a down payment on my own place, provided I don’t wind up with any more five-grand medical copays when some asshole pushes me off a ladder. And Nat’s in an even worse spot than I am. She’s got rich parents, which sounds like it should be great, but they’re the kind that, instead of actually loving their kids, they try to control them with money. She couldn’t get any need-based financial aid and they wouldn’t co-sign her loans, so to go to college, she had to go into debt to _ them, _and they’ve been trying to pull all the strings on her life ever since. You should’ve seen the fight she had on her hands when she told them she wanted to study history instead of being a lawyer—she won that one, but she can’t keep winning forever. She just wants to wipe out her debts and be free. So, I know it’s not on the same level as the stuff you were dealing with in the Depression, but can you see why walking away from this house isn’t an option for either of us?” 

“Yeah,” Steve said quietly. “I do understand what it’s like to not want to be beholden. What it’s like to want to be free. But this is about something bigger than money, Bucky.”

“Then _ tell me what the fuck that is,” _Bucky said, and when Steve jutted out his chin and remained stubbornly silent, he sighed. “What if we negotiate, then? Let us finish fixing up the house and sell it, and you scare away the next owners. Problem solved.”

“Would you really be able to do that?” Steve said, raising an eyebrow. “Let someone else give you a million dollars for a house you know I can’t let them live in?” 

“I dunno. I’m a pretty shady character.” When Steve just kept looking at him, Bucky sighed. “I guess not. But I’m not seeing another way to get all three of us out of this situation, Steve.”

“I don’t either,” Steve said, and they sat there, the silence stretching out between them, for a long moment. Then, out of nowhere, Steve said, “So, wait. If you’re not married to Natasha—”

“Married? You thought we were _ married?” _

“—Then does that mean you’re single?” He sighed deeply. “And here I am, inconveniently dead.”

Bucky threw the futon’s one lonely pillow at him, even though it went right through, of course. “You’re an asshole, Roth.”

“Roth?” Steve repeated, screwing up his face in confusion. “That’s not my name.”

“It’s on your gravestone.”

_ “Really?” _ The look on his face was hilariously offended, but he glared when Bucky grinned. “It’s not as if I’ve seen it, you know. No, I went by Roth—Mom asked me to after she married Harold, thought it was better if I acted like his son—but I never legally changed it or anything. I always thought of myself by my dad’s name. Steve Rogers.”

“Rogers,” Bucky repeated, trying it out. It suited him. “Well, then, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Steve Rogers.”

“Don’t patronize me,” Steve said. “I pushed you off a ladder.”

“And threw a dead rat at my face. And a planchette at my head. You really like throwing things, don't you? And yet, I’m still gonna go get you your damn art books, because that’s how much of a sucker I am. But think about it, okay, Steve? There’s gotta be a way we can work together on this.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Steve, but Bucky locked up the house and left it knowing that neither of them was any closer to an answer.


	8. Interlude: Outside Consultant

  
Hey, do you have a minute? Just wanna bounce something off you and see if you think it’s as weird as I do.  
  
new phone who dis?  
  
Not funny, Becca. I’m serious over here  
  
it’s a little funny  
no 4 real, im here 4u bb  
must be srs if ur asking ME 4 help  
what up?  
  
Something really weird happened at work today.  
  
weird how?  
  
Ghost is flirting w me.  
  
SHUT THE FRONT DOOR  
ghost is gay?!?!?!?!!!!111   
  
♫ Bisexual erasure ♫   
  
ghost is bi?!?!?!?!!!!111  
  
He didn’t know the word for it but turns out ghost is bi, yes  
  
say_more_right_now.gif  
  
Well  
He kinda freaked out when I told him Wanda was at Nat’s place  
  
who TF is Wanda?  
wait does Nat have a girLFRINED  
AND U DIDNT TELL ME  
u r dead 2 ME Bucky  
  
Do you want to hear about Wanda or the ghost? I’m on the clock.  
  
fuck ur schedule I’m ur sister  
both_is_good.gif  
ur legally obligated 2 give me deets on everythign  
how do u even flirt when ur dead tho inquiring minds want 2 know  
  
Well first he asked if I was single.  
  
and u said yes cause u r pathetic  
omgomgOMGOMG did he Patrick Swayze u?  
  
WTF does that mean?  
  
r u SERIOUSLY a ghost hunter whose never seen Ghost  
  
Who's  
  
fuck u  
did I spell that to your satisfaction o great one?   
  
No. I taught you better than that.  
If you're gonna say fuck, take the craft seriously and put some effort into it.  
Anyway we’re not ghost hunters. My title is Interior Design & Construction Manager.  
  
ur title is dickhead brother  
  
Fine, I'll go text Liz instead  
  
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO *deep breath* OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO  
ill be good just tell me  
*I'll   
  
Well  
I thought he was upset about Nat so I started telling him it's OK to be gay/bi/whatever orientation now  
And it turns out he kinda had me beat on that front by about 70 years  
Like, he was going to gay bars back in the day and kind of had a whole community and shit.  
  
omg did Nat completely plotz over the research possibilities?  
  
I haven't told her yet.  
  
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA you're embarrassed  
  
HI, LIZZIE, HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE THE SISTER WHO GETS TO HEAR SOME JUICY DETAILS THAT BECCA DOESN'T BECAUSE SHE'S HORRIBLE?  
  
I'm sorry  
please forgive me  
please  
please  
BUCKY  
pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?  
  
sigh  
Fine, but only because you never told Aunt Ramona about prom night.  
  
that one is still on the table but continue  
Right, so  
It started off pretty innocent, I guess  
First he said he'd ask me out if he was alive.  
  
my brother shoots and scoooores with the dead guy  
sorry sorry last one I ♥ u please don't stop talking  
  
well, I mean  
That was yesterday  
So when I got back today I was sort of joking about if he missed me  
And he may have grabbed my ass.  
...  
Becca?  
  
im literally dead  
not LITERALLY literally like your boyfriend is  
but holy shit tho  
whatd you do?  
  
Uh, YELLED, what do you think I did? This is not how I was expecting my day to go.  
Then he got all weird and embarrassed and now I think he's hiding in the basement.  
  
ok  
we can fix this  
  
BECCA HE IS DEAD  
  
NOT THAT PART  
IF I WAS DABBLING IN NECROMANCY I WOULD TELL U  
we can fix the part where hes embarrassed tho.  
embarrASSED lololololol  
  
You're so gross.  
...I have taught you well.  
  
anyway what r u still talking 2 me 4 just yell down the stairs and tell him u miss him and u want him to come check out ur pottery wheel  
  
What the fuck does that mean?  
Wait.  
Oh shit.  
Now I remember the movie.  
Jesus, Becca, why do I tell you anything?   
  
because i am the best  
and because I didn't tell aunt Ramona about prom night  
now before u go talk to ur dead boyfriend  
just tell me one thing  
have u seen a picture of what he looked like alive or anything  
  
...Something like that  
Why?  
  
Is he cute?  
  
OH MY GOD REBECCA  
  
IT IS A SALIENT QUESTION JAMES  
  
YES HE'S CUTE OKAY?  
...Fuck.  
  
BUCKY AND DEAD BOYFRIEND SITTING IN A TREE  
BECAUSE MY BROTHER CAN ONLY SCORE WITH GUYS WHOVE BEEN DEAD SINCE THE ROOSEVELT ERA  
  
I hate you.  
  



	9. Scope Creep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, everyone, I aten't dead! (The chapter title is an accurate assessment of both the chapter in particular and how I write fic in general, though. I'd claim that I haven't updated in forever because I was carefully plotting out the rest of this story, but the truth is, it's just been hard to write lately because 2020 has been a heckin' weird year.)
> 
> There's a spoiler for Knives Out in this chapter. Why is there a spoiler for Knives Out in this chapter? For that matter, why is there a _character_ from Knives Out in this fic all of a sudden? _Because I wanted to, that's why._ Anyway, if you want to avoid the spoiler, skip from "locked the door behind her" to "That was fast," to be safe.

“Heard you have a crush on the ghost,” Natasha said, and Bucky, on the other end of the phone line, sputtered for a good ten seconds before he managed to make a halfway sensible reply: “Who told you that?” he demanded, which she noticed wasn’t a denial.

“Becca,” she said. “We’re on a group chat. And please tell me you got the part where he goosed you on tape. That’s a ratings gold mine.”

_ “Group chat?” _ Bucky yelped, loudly enough that Natasha moved the phone a few inches away from her ear. “Who the fuck  _ else  _ is in this group chat?”

“Me, Becca, Maria from PoliSci, Shuri from Engineering, your aunt Ramona, and pretty soon Wanda, if Becca gets her way. Speaking of which, how does Becca know Wanda? She asked me to invite her, and I knew you’d met her, but—”

“They don’t know each other,” Bucky said. “Becca just needs a hobby. Put me on the chat.”

“No. What’s your game plan for the rest of the week?”

“We’re not done with this whole no-boys-allowed-in-the-clubhouse thing,” Bucky said, which she recognized as his way of salving his pride before he immediately gave in. “And you know the plan. We’re starting the plumbing in the upstairs bathroom tomorrow, the window guy’s coming on Thursday—”

“The plan to get rid of the ghost, James.”

The pause before Bucky answered was enough to confirm her fears, long before he said, “This isn’t a normal job, Nat. I think I gotta handle this one a different way.”

"Your job description is very specific on this point, James—”

“And I’m on schedule and under budget on the reno in spite of having a  _ broken fucking arm,  _ Nat. I’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty on that part, and you gotta cut me some slack on the rest. I’m not gonna be able to annoy Steve out of the house, but if I get to know him a little bit, figure out how to reason with him—” 

“It won’t work, and we’ll be left with an unsellable property and looking at bankruptcy for both of us. We have to get the house on the market before the property taxes come due. This isn’t a request, James; it’s the only way we get out of this in one piece. Get Ghost Boy gone, however you have to.”

“Nat—” Bucky was saying, when she tapped the red button on her phone screen to hang up. That was the one drawback to cell phones: in the old days, you could emphasize your point by slamming the receiver into the cradle.  _ Steve.  _ That was a bad sign, in a day that had been full of them.

Natasha sighed and leaned against the wall of the hallway outside her office, glaring at the phone, the bad clipart signs some student group had plastered on the opposite wall, and a couple of passing undergrads, who weren’t actually doing anything wrong but still skittered out of sight with gratifying speed. Okay, so it wasn’t Bucky’s fault that she was staring down a brand new backlog of grading that had developed while she was out, or that the bank’s insistence that she mail them a printout of  _ one  _ mortgage document had forced her to waste half the morning wrestling with the demon-infested department printer (IT kept closing her ticket, claiming they’d patched the software for poltergeists, but she’d already hard-reset the machine twice and the problem had only gotten worse, ergo: demon). And okay,  _ possibly  _ part of her mood was due to the fact that Wanda hadn’t replied to her text asking her to meet for coffee, because they were overdue for a conversation that really needed to happen face to face. But dammit, even if she was taking all of that out on Bucky just because he was a convenient target, at least she wasn’t getting sentimental over a stranger who’d been dead for seventy years.

She definitely wasn’t in the mood to come around the corner and find some asshole standing at  _ her  _ desk, in  _ her  _ office, inspecting one of the fat World War II volumes she’d been futilely scouring for mentions of Arnim Zola. “Can I help you?” she said, without bothering to lay her usual thin veneer of politeness over the words. But when he turned around, he was smiling anyway.

“Actually, I think I’m the one who can help you, Professor Rushman.”

“Mm.” Natasha was never thrilled about being recognized by strangers, but she was an expert people-watcher and it only took her seconds to size this one up. He was an attractive man, maybe six-two with blue eyes and broad shoulders, and the way he’d waltzed into her office said he knew it. He was too old to be a student, though, and more importantly, he was dressed all wrong for the role. He clearly went in for well-made clothes in expensive materials, but his coat was stained around the bottom and the sweater under it was showing wear. Rich people were only sloppy when things were good—if they fell on hard times, they worked ten times harder to keep up appearances—which meant she was dealing with a garden-variety privileged asshole. Fortunately, thanks to her adoptive parents, Natasha was an expert at that, too. “You have the advantage of me, Mr. ...?”

“Professor,” he said, dropping the book and holding out his hand. “Drysdale.”

“You’re Hugh Drysdale,” Natasha said, raising an eyebrow. She’d never heard of the man before the weekend, but she’d found a reference to Zola in one of his published papers. It had been a frustratingly brief mention with no citation, so she’d fired off an email helpfully noting the “error” and asking for his primary source, never expecting that she’d actually get a response. His research seemed too careful otherwise for it to be a sloppy mistake, and if he’d actually found a forgotten cache of Nazi documents, chances were he was hoarding it until he could publish a definitive writeup. 

Come to think of it, that would also explain why he’d shown up in person instead of replying to her email. Academic publishing was a crazy world, and people got ridiculously bent out of shape over idea theft, but if Drysdale  _ did  _ have an unknown primary source, the stakes might legitimately be high. God knew the American public gobbled up fat nonfiction books about brave Allied soldiers beating up Nazis, and if Drysdale had the makings of a potential nonfiction bestseller on his hands and thought she was trying to beat him to it, then it wouldn’t be strange at all if the knives came out.

“Call me Ransom,” Drysdale said easily, and the smile he gave her was charming enough. It didn’t touch his eyes, but then, how often did her own? “Only my TAs call me Hugh. I got your message, and I thought we should talk.”

With no warning and no time to figure out how to play this unexpected situation, Natasha fell back on the strategy that was almost always a safe bet. She leaned forward and tilted one shoulder in his direction, just enough to take her posture from defensive to flirty. “You could have emailed me back, or phoned me, instead of coming down here in person.”

“Well, now I’m glad I didn’t,” he said, flicking his eyes down just enough to be flattering without edging over into  _ my eyes are up here  _ territory. Oh, he was good. If she brought this one home to dinner, Karen Rushman would die of a glee-induced seizure before the second course. Tempting. “So what got you curious about Arnim Zola? Your courses look like they’re more focused on the USSR.”

“This is a side project,” Natasha said, hoping a little bit of the truth would put him at ease. “A friend of mine bought an old house in Vinegar Hill and wants to know if anyone famous ever lived there. A former Nazi would be, if not famous, then at least notorious.”

“I see. And what makes you think you found one?”

“Nothing solid, mostly neighborhood gossip. There was a boarder in the house who called himself Zimmerman, but somebody’s grandmother remembers hearing the name Zola.” That would satisfy him without giving away Peggy Carter—she couldn’t say why that felt important to her, but why stop playing her hunches now? Not to mention that it would avoid the whole sealed-records issue. She  _ had  _ put in a FOIA request that covered the same ground as her differently-authorized research, but life was just easier when nobody asked her to show her work. “The dates line up, given that Zola seems to have disappeared after the war. Of course, I haven’t been able to find much about him during the war, either.”

“You wouldn’t,” Drysdale said. Normally, that would have made her bristle, but he sounded legitimately matter-of-fact, rather than like he was taking a dig at her research skills. “Zola was part of Hydra. Have you heard of it?” When she shook her head, he said, “How much do you know about Hitler’s interest in the supernatural?”

Natasha gave him her best innocent, empty-headed student look. “Everything. I saw  _ Hellboy.” _

“Well, at least you didn’t say Indiana Jones,” Drysdale said, so wryly that she cracked a smile in spite of herself. 

“Sorry,” she said, “that was mean. With my students, it’s usually  _ Anastasia. _ Like you said, this isn’t my specialization, and I’m sure the truth is more complicated.”

“Maybe not as much as you’d think. Hitler saw the potential for using legends and mythology in his war propaganda. Some of his flunkies took it a little more seriously; in particular, an officer named Johann Schmidt. Schmidt was brilliant, but more… enthusiastic about the occult than the rest of the inner circle. Hydra was a secret organization, Schmidt’s brainchild, which was meant to weaponize the supernatural. Officially, Zola was assigned as Schmidt's assistant, but if you read between the lines, it sounds like his job was to be a stabilizing influence. Only it went the other way, and Zola ended up buying into the mythology too.”

“You still haven’t told me your source for all this,” Natasha said, keeping her face innocent. By now she was sure she wouldn’t get an answer, and sure enough, Drysdale arched his eyebrows and hit her with a little smile that had probably made more than one pair of panties come off in its time. This time, she let herself smile back. “I had to try.”

“Publish or perish,” he said amiably. “You know how it is.”

“Okay. Since you’re the expert, is it plausible that Zola could have ended up in Brooklyn?”

“It’s likely, in fact. Johann Schmidt fell out of favor sometime in ’41. Officially, he was put in charge of a remote research facility; unofficially, Hitler was starting to see him as a threat and wanted him out of the way. Orders kept coming from that facility until it was captured near the end of the war, but at that point Zola reported that Schmidt had died in ’43. Zola took over communications and imitated Schmidt’s style convincingly enough that Berlin never questioned it. After Allied Command captured Zola, they decided to recruit him as part of something called—”

“Operation Paperclip. That one I know.”  _ Thanks, Wanda. _

“Yes. And apparently he requested an assignment in New York, which corroborates your research. Which I’d still love to see in detail.”

“Probably as much as I’d love to see yours.”

“Well, then, maybe you should let me take you to dinner tonight and see if we can’t work something out.”

“Oof,” Natasha said, with as much fake regret as she could muster. “Tonight I have a commitment that I really can’t get out of.”

It was always interesting to see how people reacted the first time she told them no. Drysdale didn’t look happy about it, but he kept his composure, which was more than a lot of guys did. “Another time, then.”

“Another time. By the way, there wouldn’t happen to be any photos of Zola, would there?”

She watched him figure it out and frown. “You think somebody’s grandmother would recognize a neighbor from seventy years ago?”

“Probably not, but it’s worth a try.”

“No portraits that I know of, but I’ve found a handful of group shots. They’re poor quality, but I’ll send you some scans.”

“Thank you,” Natasha said, carefully hiding her surprise. He was definitely still an asshole, but between the high stakes and the personal rejection, sharing even that much of his research material was a surprising gesture of goodwill.

...Or maybe he was just a  _ smart  _ asshole who didn’t want to alienate a potential source of future information, dinner date or not. Peeling away all the layers of a person’s motivation never got any less tricky, whether the person in question was alive or dead.

Drysdale left after promising to email the photos as soon as he got back to his office, and once he was gone, Natasha was free to do what she’d really wanted to do the whole time: shuffle through the papers on her desk and make sure he hadn’t found anything that would give him the address of the house in Vinegar Hill. She didn’t tend to leave that kind of information lying around—she didn’t tend to leave evidence of her  _ existence  _ lying around, if she could help it—but if the roles had been reversed, she sure as hell would have rifled through Drysdale’s desk, so it was worth making sure nothing was out of place. 

“What was Hugh Drysdale doing in your office?” Wanda asked, and it was only years of practice at sneaking around and being snuck up on herself that kept Natasha from jumping out of her chair.

“Wanda,” she said, forcing herself to turn around slowly enough to make her old ballet teachers proud. “I was looking for you. I wanted to talk.”

“About what, your side project?” Wanda said, and Natasha was surprised to realize that she was visibly upset, and, unlike Natasha, not very good at concealing it. “About  _ him?” _

“Actually, yes, I was going to… Why? Do you know him?”

“I know  _ of _ him.” Wanda was struggling to get control of her expression, but her eyes were blazing. Natasha had known she could hold a grudge like nobody’s business, but this was different. This was  _ rage. _ “I saw him at a conference last year. He was on a panel about Holocaust deniers, saying their ‘viewpoint’ should be addressed in classes. Saying undergrads deserved to hear both sides. As if it was nothing but a debate to him.”

“I didn’t know that,” Natasha said, with completely sincere disgust. Wanda gave her a flatly disbelieving look, and she grimaced. “Come on, Wanda, I only  _ act  _ like I know everything. You look like this is personal for you.”

“My great-grandfather was in Auschwitz.”

“I didn’t know that either. I’m sorry.”

“What was he doing here?”

“Drysdale? I read one of his papers and emailed him about Arnim Zola. I never thought he’d show up in person.”

“You were flirting with him,” Wanda said tonelessly.

Natasha looked back at her blankly, and it was almost the biggest mistake of the day, because Wanda obviously saw it as a lack of remorse when it was anything but. “I thought you trusted me,” she said, and turned to leave the office. And Natasha abruptly realized that they weren’t having the conversation she’d thought they were, not at all.

“I’m only good at flirting when it doesn’t  _ matter,  _ Wanda,” she blurted.

Wanda turned back, startled, although not, Natasha suspected, nearly as startled as she was herself. Every instinct she’d developed over the last twenty years was screaming at her to  _ stop, _ stop now, before she made the cardinal mistake of revealing something about herself that was true. “I was trying to find out what his sources are,” she said. “That’s not what I ever wanted from you.”

“So you do want something from me,” Wanda said, looking disappointed.

“Not that way. I want…” Natasha made herself take a long, slow breath. God, why did honesty have to be so excruciating? Her face was getting hot, and her instincts were telling her to keep her mouth shut and her barricades in place… but they were also telling her that this was a rare make-or-break moment, the kind that had the power to decide how her relationship with Wanda would look forever. “Being honest doesn’t come naturally to me, Wanda. At this point, using people might be the only thing that does. That’s why I've been keeping you at a distance, because it’s easy for me to find myself using people. That’s not how I want things to be with you.”

Wanda looked startled, and then suspicious, which stung, even though she’d more than earned it. “So how do you want things to be?” 

The question hung in the air between them for a long moment, raw and, frankly, terrifying, and Natasha knew she had to get this right; Wanda was too smart to give her another chance. “I want to trust you,” she said, “but, if I’m being honest... I want a lot more than that. I want to introduce you to my friends who aren’t from work. I want to sit on the couch with you and hate-watch historically inaccurate movies. I want to bring you soup when you’re sick, although it won’t be as good as yours—”

“No, it won’t,” Wanda said matter-of-factly.

Natasha smiled. “I want,” she said, “to take you out to dinner. On a date, to be clear. No strings attached; if it doesn’t work out, we can go back to the way things were. But I think we should at least give it a try.”

“No,” Wanda said, and Natasha had a very unpleasant couple of seconds before she added, “There are going to be a lot of strings, because  _ I’m _ attaching them. At the very least, you have to tell me all about your side hustle, since I’m already helping you with it anyway.”

“That was mean.”

“That was payback.”

“That’s a big part of why I like you.” Natasha glanced at the clock above the door. She was late for class, but the grace period was fifteen minutes, which meant she had five more before the students gave up on her and bailed. “I have two more classes today and then I’m done at three-thirty. What about you?”

“I’m done at four.”

“Then why don’t we meet at four, and I’ll tell you what I didn’t tell Hugh Drysdale?”

“All the things you didn’t tell him?” Wanda pressed.

“Maybe let me work up to all the things. I  _ will  _ try,” Natasha said, in response to Wanda’s skeptical look. “Scout’s honor. Wait, no; I’ll do something better. It’s going to sound strange, but I’ll explain it when I see you tonight. Trust me,” she said, picking up her phone and hitting Redial. 

“Don’t get rid of Steve yet,” she said, when Bucky answered. “I have some questions I need to ask him first.”

“Jeez, Nat, one-eighty much?” He was snarky, because he was Bucky, but she knew him well enough to hear his curiosity taking over. “What changed in the last, uh, seventeen minutes?”

_ Everything,  _ Natasha thought, but she’d said enough sappy things for one day already. Hell, she’d already told Wanda more in those seventeen minutes than she usually told everyone she knew in a week, collectively. “I think I’m onto something, and Wanda’s been helping me with it, so I’m bringing her in on the project. We’ll be at the house around four-thirty.” 

“Well, I’d argue with you, but it would be pointless, so Ghost Boy and I will see you guys then, I guess.” Bucky hung up on her, which was more or less equitable, and she turned back to Wanda. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Wanda said, after a moment. “I’ll meet you at four.”

Natasha gathered up the stack of papers on her desk absently, wondering if normal people always felt this dazed after making a confession of love. Well, not in so many words, but she’d been telling the truth when she said she was going to have to work up to sharing everything. And that was before she even started trying to sort through what she’d gotten out of Drysdale. So now she had a Nazi who was fascinated by the supernatural, and an American kid dead, but not gone, just a few months after said Nazi arrived on the scene. That implied a connection, and maybe the key to unraveling the whole thing, which was getting more and more urgent—not only because of the unforgiving state of the project’s finances, but because she had absolutely no desire to see Bucky get hurt. 

Human relationships were hard enough, as evidenced by the way her own hangups and good intentions gone bad had nearly ruined the whole Wanda thing before it even got started. What kind of happy ending could he possibly expect if he fell in love with a damn ghost?

It wasn’t like Natasha to make mistakes, even small ones. But given the number of things on her mind, not to mention the fact that she really did have minutes left to get to her classroom, maybe it was forgivable that she never thought about clearing the queue of the malfunctioning printer before she left her office and locked the door behind her.

Ransom Drysdale wasn’t well liked. Not in the academic community at large, not by his colleagues at the private New Hampshire university where he taught, not by his family, and not even by his friends, when it came right down to it. That was fine with him, though. He had something better than likeability: he was controversial. 

Ransom had been a smart kid, and the fact that he’d never had to work very hard for anything had left him bored throughout most of his early life, right up to the point where he’d made prep school debate team and realized that he had an instinctive ability to win either side of an argument. Law school would have been a natural fit for him, but it also would have been too much work. History, though—there was an astonishing amount of shit to be stirred up about dead people, if you knew where to go looking. And unlike living people, they almost never fought back.

(All right, so they were  _ occasionally  _ capable of a little fuckery from beyond the grave, but even his grandfather, the old bastard, hadn’t been a match for him in the end. Over time, the fact that he’d beaten a murder rap—on a technicality, according to student gossip; faculty gossip made the slightly more accurate assessment that the “technicality” had basically been invented by a team of  _ very _ expensive lawyers—had only added to his mystique.) 

Nazis, and Hydra in particular, were also right up his alley. Yeah, yeah, they were evil, but once he learned to throw around phrases like “critical analysis” and “teach the controversy,” he found out that here, too, he could get away with pretty much anything. And, yes, that was the same skillset that had helped him dig up some heretofore unknown secrets about Hydra, hopefully enough to write books that would be reviewed as “daring” and “provocative” (not to mention the ever-popular “lucrative”) for the rest of his professional life. Which was why it was so important to keep this Rushman woman from beating him to the punch.

Of course, there was no problem if the story she was telling him about some old house in Brooklyn checked out. Hell, he might even be able to use her little project to add some local color to his book, once he weaseled the location out of her. That way, it wouldn’t be an entirely wasted trip.

Then again, why set the bar that low? Rushman might not be a threat to his forthcoming book, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t keep working the charm, see if he could get that dinner after all, and maybe a little more. He liked a woman who was a challenge, and the fact that she didn’t seem to be entirely on the up-and-up didn’t diminish his interest at all. After all, it took one to know one.

“That was fast,” the department secretary said as he walked past the reception desk, and Ransom turned, pasting his smile back into place. When he walked in and asked for Rushman’s office, she’d assumed he was there from IT, and he hadn’t bothered to correct her. It never hurt to have a ready-made excuse to wander around in places he wasn’t supposed to be. “You get it fixed already?”

He was opening his mouth to give her some generic response about having to come back later when the department printer—an enormous, outdated clunker that was badly in need of an exorcism—made a grinding sound and sprang to life, spitting out several torn and wrinkled pages before it settled into a smooth rhythm. He favored her with a little shrug, to distract her as he grabbed the stack of paper, but it was wasted on her; she was busy looking disgusted. “Sure, anybody else puts in a ticket and it takes two weeks, but Natalie can’t get her cat memes to print and it’s fixed in an hour,” she muttered, turning her back to him in a huff and letting him find his own way out of the department office.

Ransom carefully didn’t allow himself to smile until he was back out in the late autumn sunlight and walking toward the quad. Then he flipped through the pages, removed an official-looking sheet with a Brooklyn address on it, and tossed the rest of the stack into a trash bin. Things had a way of working out for him, and now he knew it hadn’t been a wasted trip at all.


	10. Disaster Management

“Get Ghost Boy gone, however you have to,” Natasha said into the phone, and Bucky got as far as, “Nat—” before she hung up and left him alone with the hollow pit that had just opened up in his stomach. 

Because he knew, with a certainty he’d rarely experienced in his life before now, that he couldn’t do it. And it wasn’t because Steve was too stubborn, although he was, in fact, remarkably fucking stubborn. It wasn’t because he was too strong of a presence in the house, although he seemed to be recovering more of his previously-fading ghosty power every day Bucky spent not kicking him out. There were things that could be done to weaken a ghost, completely apart from his own highly successful method of aggravating them into rage-quitting reality. Most of that stuff was more in the general “clearing negative energy” category than beating on a specific ghost until it dissipated, but he hadn’t gone into this completely clueless about what to do if things got rough. 

The problem was that to make those things work, you had to _ want _them to work, and Bucky… didn’t. He wanted this job to never end, even if it meant he never got his payday, even if it meant leaving Nat furious or, worse, feeling like he’d let her down. He wanted to keep hanging out with Steve for twelve or fourteen hours a day, to get the dead asshole to open up about what had kept him here and fix it, and then… and then…

But there was no _ and then, _because Steve had been dead since 1946.

Fuck.

“Fuck,” he repeated out loud, and threw his phone at the futon. “Fuck. _ Fuck!” _

“Something wrong?” Steve said, in that profoundly dry voice of his, right next to Bucky’s shoulder.

“I’m in love with you,” Bucky said, guileless and helpless and completely without thinking, and only later did he realize that of all the things he could have said, he’d just found the one that was guaranteed to take this already plenty bad situation and escalate the hell out of it.

There was a long silence, while Bucky breathed heavily and Steve—it almost felt pointed—didn’t. Then Steve said, “Turn off the movie cameras.”

“What?” said Bucky, who had, honest to God and all the saints, completely forgotten he was being recorded for Natasha’s show. Then he said, “Fuck,” again, because it hadn’t helped any of the first three times, but there was always an off chance that it might start. It didn’t. “Won’t make any difference,” he added, flopping down onto the futon. “It’s not like you’re being recorded. Clint can kind of see a shimmer where you are and sometimes the infrared picks you up as a cold spot, but we’ve definitely established that nobody can really see or hear you but me.” 

“Turn off the movie cameras,” Steve repeated, jaw jutting out in that little stubborn gesture that Bucky had come to know well over the past few weeks.

“Why, you afraid Nat’s gonna see me making an ass of myself? Because I’m pretty sure that ship has sailed, pal,” said Bucky, who was now consciously debating the merits of trying to slide between the uncomfortable foam cushions and disappear forever.

“Oh, for…” Steve blipped out of sight, and a second later the power went out. 

“Shit!” Bucky said, sitting up. “You better not have broken anything expensive, you dead asshole,” he shouted in the direction of the electrical box, and then he went “Eep” when Steve popped back into existence on the couch beside him.

“Oh, I’m the asshole?” Steve said heatedly, as if they’d never been interrupted by his knack for postmortem property damage. “What about you, Barnes? You’re in _ love _with me? What the hell?”

“You’re… you’re mad about it?” Bucky said, in the five seconds of being perplexed that he got to enjoy before he was just angry and sad again. Fucking _ feelings. _They were nothing but trouble. “Look, you don’t have to like me back, but I don’t think you get to be mad at me because I fell for you.”

“Yes, I do!” Steve informed him, somehow managing to sound aggravated and painfully earnest at the same time. “As if losing Peggy wasn’t bad enough. At least we started on the same plane of existence. You and me, we never even had a chance. You have the nerve to love me back and I can’t even act on it. What kind of future could we have together when I don’t even have a body, Bucky?”

“None, apparently,” Bucky said, because now he was both irritated and confused. He knew why _ he _ was pissed off by the situation, but Steve’s reaction… Shit. He’d barely registered the fact that he wasn’t the only one who’d just made a confession, and he definitely didn’t have time to think through the ramifications right now. “Nat’s telling me we’re running out of time and I have to get rid of you. And if I don’t do it, Steve, then _ she’s _gonna do it, and if one of us ends up having to exorcise you, then you want it to be me, because she’s not gonna be gentle.”

“She can try,” Steve said, in a tone of grim resignation. “Forget me, Buck. I got nothing to offer you. You should go get drunk and go to a dance hall, or whatever it is people do these days. Find somebody who actually has a life to share with you and move on.”

“Arrrrgh,” Bucky groaned, because… well, because acknowledging that a relationship didn’t have a future was one thing. Nobody _ liked _ it when shitty circumstances kept two people from being together, but at least that was a known category of suck. Steve’s ongoing refusal to even discuss the haunting, on the other hand, was just goddamn incomprehensible. “Why won’t you tell me what’s so fucking _ important _here? Because I’ve been all over this house for months and I still haven’t figured out what’s so dangerous about it, and I’m sorry, Steve, but I’m really starting to think this isn’t about you protecting anybody so much as it’s about you having something to prove.”

“That’s not true. You don’t understand—”

“I understand that you don’t trust me enough to fill me in.” Now Bucky was being an asshole just because he could, but the hurt on Steve’s face didn’t even give him the satisfaction he’d hoped for, just more general feelings of shittiness. “I told you how I feel because one way or another, this is ending, Steve. Even if you somehow manage to hang on by your ghostly fingernails when Nat calls in the old priest and the young priest, she’ll keep coming at you until she finds something that works. You want me to move on? How about this, pal: I will if you will.”

“Why do the priests’ ages matter?” Steve said blankly.

“What? Oh, no, that’s from a mov—oh, fuck you, don’t try to change the subject. We’ve been dancing around this for months. You’re not here because you’re scared to move on; I know you better than that. And even if you were, you’d be willing to take your lumps in Purgatory if you thought you’d see your mom again at the end of it. I don’t see any proof that you’re trapped here by anything but your own goddamn stubbornness. So either get the hell out of this house already, or tell me why it’s so important that you stay. Because I can’t help you unless you really convince me that what you’re doing here is worth it.”

“I don’t need your help,” Steve snapped. “I can do this on my own.”

“Maybe so, but for God’s sake, Steve, why do you _ have _ to?” Bucky demanded. “Who made it your responsibility to protect this house for the rest of time?”

“Not for the rest of time, just until it’s safe,” Steve said, and Bucky was leaning forward, actually starting to believe that Steve might finally give him some answers, when the basement door banged open.

“So while you two dickheads were yelling at each other,” Clint said, “or at least I assume you were, because I can only hear one of you, was it gonna occur to anybody that whatever you did to the power left me in a dark basement under a _ literal haunted house?” _

“Oh, shit,” Steve said, eyes widening. “Bucky, tell him I’m sorry. I completely forgot he was here.”

“Steve says to quit your bellyaching,” Bucky said. “We all know you have that creepy 40/20 vision thing where you see better in the dark than most of us see in daylight, anyway.”

“Yeah, so let’s test it out while I’m in a haunted coal cellar full of tetanus,” Clint snapped. “And I’ve got news for you, Barnes: either you or Steve is fixing whatever wire he cut, because I did not sign up for holding a flashlight in my mouth while I try to do electrical work.”

“I just tripped the circuit breaker,” said Steve, who’d apparently learned more from Luis than Bucky had realized. “The last thing I’d want is to start a fire.”

“Steve says a little electrocution never hurt anybody,” said Bucky.

“Christ,” Clint said. “You two have no idea how annoying you are, do you? If one of you wasn’t dead I’d be begging you to fuck already and get it out of your systems. I’m going out for coffee. _ And _I’m expensing it,” he added, over his shoulder, as he headed out through the kitchen.

There was a long, quiet moment after the back door banged shut. Then Bucky said, “Steve,” at the same moment Steve said, “I can’t believe he—I’m sorry, Bucky. I didn’t mean for this to get so out of hand that it would come between you and your friends.”

“Clint didn’t mean it like it probably sounded to somebody from your time, Steve. He’ll cool off in a minute. And, hell, when it comes down to it, he’s not wrong. I am maybe a little sexually frustrated over here.” Bucky leaned back on the futon with a groan. “What the hell are we supposed to do about this?”

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “On the one hand, it’s not the first time there’s been somebody who I… couldn’t be with the way I wanted to. But I didn’t exactly get a guidebook on this whole afterlife thing. I only know what I’ve figured out, and so far, there’s only really one thing I’m sure about: it’s dangerous for people to be in this house. Not just you and Nat, but… well, everybody. What’s here, it… it picks up on the energy when people come in, and it settles down again when the house is empty for a while. It’s like it’s looking for someone to latch onto. It’s gotten weaker over time, but when it will be safe again, if it ever will… I don’t know. That’s why I tried to get you to leave, Bucky. I just want you to be safe. And the more I tell you, the more it puts you at risk. That’s what you don’t understand. That’s why I couldn’t tell you anything more than I did.”

Bucky sighed, resisting the urge to ask the same question yet again and expect a different answer. “Whatever it is,” he said, “I know this puts you in a shitty situation too, Steve. I’m sorry. If it hadn’t been us, it would’ve been someone else, because the foreclosure price on this place was a fuckin’ _ steal, _ but for what it’s worth, I am sorry.”

“So am I. I may not understand this whole house-flapping thing—”

“Flipping.”

“—Flipping, but I do understand being flat broke and wanting a better life. I can see how hard you and Natasha are working for that. I’d help you both if I could.”

“I believe you. ...You’d go out with me, though, huh?” Bucky added, with the trace of a smile. “If things were different.”

“Out? Hell no. We’d be in my old bedroom, doing things we could’ve both gotten arrested for in 1946. But things aren’t different.”

“No, they aren’t.” Bucky managed an extremely forced half-smile. “Which one was your bedroom?”

“Last door on the left,” Steve said. “Why?”

“Trying to picture it, obviously. What we would’ve done in your room if it was 1946. What it would’ve been like to live in this house with you. I guess I know a lot of facts about your life and death, but not what it was really like for you on a daily basis.”

Steve looked thoughtful. “It wasn’t perfect,” he said. “There was the usual stuff—not much privacy, always someone stomping around upstairs while you were trying to sleep. But you have to remember that my mom and I were coming from a rear tenement. We were used to people living five, six, sometimes more in two little rooms. After that, this house felt like a paradise. Like home. And living across the hall from Peggy, that part wasn’t hard at all.” He was smiling a little, now. “Used to wait until I heard her door open to go out in the hall, so she’d start talking without me having to figure out what to say.”

Bucky’s eyes went to the Sharpie drawings on the wall, which he still hadn’t had the heart to paint over. “Had it bad for her, huh?”

“You have no idea.”

“Oh, pal, I really think I might.”

Miraculously, Steve didn’t have a ready answer to that one, and they both sat there in silence for a while until something under Bucky’s ass started to vibrate. For a second he just thought Steve had chosen a _ really _inappropriate way to try to lighten the mood, and then he realized what was happening. “Shit,” he said, digging between the couch cushions and coming up with his phone, which he swiped to answer. “Hey, Nat. What’s—”

“Don’t get rid of Steve yet,” Natasha cut him off. “I have some questions I need to ask him first.”

If Bucky’s heart did some things, then that was between him and his circulatory system, and he resolved not to let her hear it in his voice. “Jeez, Nat, one-eighty much? What changed in the last, uh—” He checked the phone’s clock, and said, “Seventeen minutes?”

“I think I’m onto something, and Wanda’s been helping me with it,” Natasha said, “so I’m bringing her in on the project. We’ll be at the house around four-thirty.”

_ Don’t get your hopes up, _ Bucky told himself. _ Don’t do it, Barnes; do not under any circumstances imagine that this is more than a short reprieve. _“Well, I’d argue with you, but it would be pointless,” he said, “so Ghost Boy and I will see you guys then, I guess.” He hung up on her this time, because he could, and looked at Steve. “Apparently you get to not-live another day,” he said. “Don’t ask me why. Every time I think I’ve got that woman figured out, she throws me a curveball. But I’d answer her questions, if I was you.”

“You gonna tell her the real answers if I do?”

“What? Oh, yeah. I was fucking with Clint just now, not with you. Definitely not Nat. And speaking of Clint,” Bucky sighed, “I should get the lights back on before they get here.”

He was deliberately giving Steve an opening to go fix whatever he’d broken, but he guessed he couldn’t be too surprised when Steve didn’t. In love or not, he should’ve known Steve was definitely gonna keep slowing things down and making them difficult right up to the end. And for once, he couldn’t find it in himself to regret it, even if it did take him ten minutes to find where Steve had hidden the fucking flashlight. 

_ Ought to feel like it’s a lucky break that he’s dead and you can’t wind up married to that stubborn asshole, _ he tried to tell himself, and then he reeled back from the fusebox as if he’d actually been shocked, not just startled by his own brain’s capacity to constantly make things worse. _ Marry him? Where the hell did that come from? God, Barnes, dial it back, you can’t even kiss the guy. _But that definitely didn’t make him feel any better, just more pissed off. Nothing did, in fact, until, trying to work both distracted and trying to work one-handed, he managed to slice his thumb on the sharp edge of the fusebox; that, at least, let him bust out a good long string of obscenities, which was definitely better than standing around alone in a basement with a flashlight between his teeth and feeling infinitely more sorry for himself.

It was a pretty goddamn bad day when bandaging and/or swearing about a bleeding appendage was an improvement.

Steve swore he hadn’t fucked with the cameras, just the fusebox, and Bucky was inclined to believe him, partly because he was a shitty liar but mostly because technology didn’t _ need _ghosts interfering with it to disconnect itself from the wi-fi, default to its crappiest possible state, and generally make itself a pain in the ass. He was still tweaking the video settings to get them back up to Natasha’s exacting standards, while Clint drank his coffee and Steve did a sort of general floating sulk in the corner, when Nat and Wanda walked in.

“So this is it,” Nat was saying, as she opened the door. “You’ve met Bucky, who’s my business partner, and this is Clint, who we hired to—” And that was as far as she got before Wanda’s eyes fixed on Steve, and she raised her hands, twisted her fingers into something that wasn’t quite the sign to ward off the Evil Eye but was definitely reminiscent of it, and pushed her palms outward toward him. 

It shouldn’t have done anything. Steve should have just looked at her with vague disappointment, and made some dry comment, and that should have been it. Steve definitely shouldn’t have buckled like he’d been punched in the spiritual equivalent of his solar plexus and flickered like a signal going out.

“Shit!” Bucky was out of his seat and between Wanda and Steve before his brain caught up to his body. Once it did, he wondered what he was trying to accomplish, given that Steve could just sink through the floor to get away from Wanda if he wanted to. Steve didn’t make any moves to protect himself, though; he just hovered there, looking shell-shocked, while Bucky said, “Wanda, what the hell! I don’t come into your house and start throwing around magic!”

“I don’t have hauntings in my house!” Wanda shot back. “Powerful ones, at that!”

“I’m really not,” Steve said. He looked baffled, and also decidedly more blurry around the edges than he had a moment before. 

“You can see him, though,” Bucky said. The implications hadn’t hit him until that moment. “Steve, how many people have been able to see you ever?”

“Everyone, until I died,” Steve said sharply. “Since then? A couple of people said they saw _ something, _but as far as I know, the only person who could see my face was you.”

“Okay, he says she’s pretty unique,” Bucky translated for Natasha, because it didn’t take any particular spiritual sensitivity to know she was going to be pissed if he didn’t fill her in. “So, uh, good call bringing Wanda here, I guess? But, Wanda, could you please not, I dunno, try to banish my boyfriend?”

“Boyfriend?” Wanda and Steve said together, turning the word into a strange echoey sound.

“I mean…” Bucky made a helpless motion with his arms, at least as far as the sling holding the left one would allow. “Not really the point right now.”

“We’re going to talk about it later, though,” Steve said, in a tone that made it a threat.

“I got it from my grandmother,” Wanda said, such a simple, commonplace statement that they all turned and looked at her. “My talent, I mean, but she also taught me how to use the magic. My twin brother doesn’t have it, only me. Sometimes I do blessings and cleanses to earn a little money on the side. Grad school isn’t cheap, you know,” she added defensively, when Natasha looked at her with the most genuine surprise Bucky had ever seen on her face. “A girl has to eat, and sometimes buy chicken to make people soup.”

“I wasn’t judging,” Natasha said. “I just didn’t know. All this time I’ve thought nobody at work would take me seriously if they knew about my side hustle,” she added, faintly rueful. The _ I don’t like not knowing things like this _part of her statement went without saying.

“Okay, but can we circle back to the _ no more banishments _part for a minute?” Bucky said. “I gather that Natasha has some stuff to fill all of us in on.”

He was looking at Wanda when he said it, but Natasha chose to ignore any byplay in favor of filling the rest of them in on the broad strokes: her potential discovery about the former lodger, Arnim Zola; her conversation with Ransom Drysdale about Zola’s Nazi past. Bucky didn’t watch her while she spoke; he watched Steve. And by God, was it enlightening. It seemed to him that Steve hadn’t known who the man he knew as Zimmerman was, either, but he’d nodded, a weird little unconscious gesture for a ghost, when Nat said Zola had become a convert to his Nazi leader’s theories about the supernatural. “Although what he planned to do in New York, I don’t know,” she finished, “and it seems like he died before it panned out,” and that was where Steve visibly jumped.

“Got something you wanna share with the class, Stevie?” he asked dryly.

“No,” Steve said, and then, slowly, “I really don’t know what he was—planning—to do here, but I… I think I know who did. I don’t think they would have just turned a former Nazi loose in Brooklyn. They would’ve kept an eye on him.” And Bucky followed his eyes to the scene he’d drawn on the wall in Sharpie, what felt like a thousand years ago now.

“Peggy Carter,” he said, as it clicked into place. “You think she was, what, his handler?”

“I don’t know what that is, but in retrospect, it’s hard to believe she really worked for the phone company.” Steve shrugged. “It doesn’t do much good, though, I guess. Unless they declassified the records when she died.”

Bucky relayed this to the others, and Natasha’s eyebrows rose. “When she died?” she said. “Margaret Carter isn’t dead. Bucky, tell your ghost I just spoke to her a couple of weeks ago.”

“He can hear you,” Bucky said, but maybe it was a mercy that she could neither see nor hear him. The sound Steve made when it hit him was… well, Bucky guessed the term was ‘unearthly moan,’ wasn’t it? “He’s, um. Processing it, I think.”

“Is she okay?” Steve asked, urgently. “Is she happy?”

“She’s close to a hundred years old, buddy, calm down,” Bucky said, and that was when the idea hit him, terrible and simple. He swallowed hard, and forced the words out. “Nat, you recorded that interview, didn’t you?”

“Do you think it’s a good idea?” she asked—asked him, not Steve, which meant she knew what he was thinking.

“No,” Bucky said, honestly. “I hate it. But Steve loves her and he hasn’t seen her for seventy years, it’s kind of the least we can do to let him watch the tape, for God’s sake.”

“It _ is _the least you could do,” said Wanda, and something about her tone made both of them look at her. “You’re both thinking about how this would affect Steve. What about how it would affect her, to get to talk to him again?”

Bucky felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach. Actually, he felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach for about the fifth time today. But what was he supposed to do, be the kind of shitty person who’d refuse one small kindness to the guy he professed to love? “Would she come here if we asked her?” he asked Natasha, very quietly.

“I don’t know if it would be feasible to bring her here.” Confronted with the possibility of concluding Steve’s longest-lasting piece of unfinished business on the mortal plane, which had at least a decent chance of concluding his _ existence _on this plane right along with it, Natasha, who hours ago had put a ticking clock on Steve’s afterlife, looked oddly conflicted about going through with it. She would, Bucky knew, but this was… unexpected. “She’s ninety-six years old and not very mobile.”

“I’m not talking about bringing her here,” Wanda said. “I’m talking about taking Steve to her.”

“What?” said Steve, Bucky, and Natasha together, in tones varying from painful hope to flat disbelief. “Um, yeah, that’s impossible,” Bucky said quickly, before Steve could get his hopes up. “Ghosts are tied to the places they haunt, Wanda. I’ve never heard of anybody just, you know, calling a supernatural Uber.”

“I could,” said Wanda. “Well, not an Uber. But I could take him to see her.”

Bucky hissed air in between his teeth. He didn’t want to believe it; if she was serious, she was calling into question every rule he’d ever learned about ghosts, which was… not reassuring. On the other hand, he’d just seen her smack down a ghost in a way he’d never thought possible, either. “How does it work?” he asked.

“He’s connected to the house,” Wanda said. “You take a piece of the house with you, and I sort of... convince the piece to represent the house. It’s complicated, and hard to explain, but I should be able to do it for a couple of hours. How far away does this woman live?”

“Queens,” said Natasha. “Is this safe, Wanda?”

“For me or for him?” Wanda shrugged. “Safe enough. If anything happens to the spell, he’ll snap back here. It won’t hurt me. And I’ll be tired afterward, but nothing a good night’s sleep won’t fix.”

“How come we’ve never heard of anybody being able to do this before?” Bucky asked.

Wanda shrugged. “There isn’t a lot of call for it. Most people who are being haunted are looking for a permanent solution. Not many of them would pay for a service like this just to be kind.”

Natasha looked at Bucky long enough and hard enough to make him distinctly uncomfortable. Then she said, “Wanda, do you have time to try this tonight?”

“I was hoping I might have a date,” Wanda said pointedly, “but this is more important.”

“Then I’ll call Peggy and see if she’s up for a visit,” Natasha said, and went outside to get a better cell signal.

Bucky went into the kitchen and rummaged around in the cabinets until he found the box where he’d thrown all the old hardware he’d stripped from the house. He came back with one of the doorknobs, a heavy brass rod with a textured glass handle. “Will this work? I’m pretty sure it’s original to the house, and it’s portable and easy to hold, at least.”

Wanda looked as if she was weighing a number of responses, few of which had to do with the question, but in the end she nodded. “Steve,” she said, holding it out to him by the metal piece, and he materialized beside her and put his fingertips on the glass, frowning. 

“How do we know if it’s working?” he asked

“I’ll go outside, and if you come with me, then it’s working. ...I should warn you that she may not be able to see or hear you.”

“I’m kinda used to that.”

“I imagine so.” Wanda looked at him with something that wasn’t quite pity, but before she could say more, Natasha stuck her head in through the door. 

“We can see her,” she said, “but we need to go right now. I called for a car.”

Two rideshares in one day? Natasha was eating up budget on this sub-project like nobody’s business, and Bucky wasn’t sure how to take that. He knew she’d felt a connection to Peggy, but that didn’t explain why she was being so… accommodating. If whatever had happened between her and Wanda had actually softened her up this much, he was never going to let her hear the end of it, that was for sure. “Good luck,” he said, to all three of them, and then, just to Steve, “Whatever happens, I… I hope you get what you need out of this.”

Steve gave him a long look, then a quick nod. “Thanks, Buck,” he said, before dissolving back into invisibility. He was still there, because Bucky could just see a faint shimmer in the air, but Bucky guessed he was trying to help Wanda by going less corporeal. _ Sure, for her he’ll make life easier, _he thought, and shook his head. It wasn’t Steve’s fault Bucky was vaguely jealous of Wanda for how easily she’d connected with Steve, or Nat for falling in love with somebody she could actually kiss, or even Peggy for the fact that Steve had stubbornly clung to this house for seven decades but seemed to forget all about encroaching dangers and impending doom when he got a chance to see her again. He did find that he was holding his breath when Wanda walked out and shut the front door behind her, and he let it out in an annoyed huff as soon as she was gone. Then he said, “Clint, I need you to help me with something upstairs.”

“Don’t I even get dinner and a movie first?” When Bucky didn’t even bother with the obligatory eyeroll, Clint said, “Sorry. Sore spot, I get it. What’s left to do? I thought we were basically done up there.”

“So did I,” Bucky said grimly. “C’mon.”

The second story of the house had room for four generously-sized bedrooms by modern standards. In the 1940s, it had been subdivided into six rooms, three on either side of the hall, plus one oddly-shaped little room at the end that was barely bigger than a closet. Most of the work they’d done upstairs had been restoring the rooms to what Nat had guessed were their original sizes. Bucky had overseen Clint and the random local college kid they’d hired while they reframed the walls and closed off the two spare doorways. It had gone quickly and easily, mostly because Steve was still feeling guilty enough about breaking his fucking arm to let them work more or less unhindered. Bucky had been waiting for a skeleton or something to fall out of a wall when Clint took a pry bar to it, but nothing had happened, and he’d ended up spending most of his time bitching about the added expense of hiring somebody for work he could have easily done himself if he’d had two good arms. The small room, which Nat had speculated might have been intended as a nursery, had been converted to a walk-in closet, and that was where he took Clint now, setting a camera on a tripod to capture the conversation and then taking a deep breath before he switched over to exposition mode.

“So according to Steve, this used to be his bedroom,” he said, swinging open the double closet doors. Steve would have entered through a little pocket door that they’d replaced with clean new drywall, sealing this off from the hallway. “Which makes sense; he was a kid when he and his mom moved in here, so he got the smallest space, the one the owner couldn’t charge as much for. His mom and his stepdad Harold technically shared the room next door, but Harold’s lover had the room next to that one, and that’s where he spent most of his nights.”

“Yeah, you told me this already. When we were moving the walls around, I asked you why a boarding house would have a door between two bedrooms like that. Remember?”

“I’m making a point, Clint,” Bucky said, gritting his teeth. “The point is, this is the room Steve lived in, and this is only a two-story house, right? So how come two hours ago, Steve told me that one of the annoying things about living in a boarding house was that somebody was always stomping around upstairs when he was trying to sleep?”

“But there’s no bedroom above this,” Clint said. “Hell, we didn’t even find an att—” He cut himself off, coming to the same conclusion Bucky had. “We didn’t find an attic access. Oh my God, we’re so _ stupid, _Barnes.”

“I was leaving the attic till last,” Bucky said, resisting the temptation to _ well, actually _Clint about it. Yeah, it was on his to-do list, but Steve had managed to keep him distracted from it until just now. “I knew the roof was in good shape, so I figured it would just be a matter of blowing in an extra layer of insulation, which I’ve done a million times, because old houses like this usually don’t have a finished attic. But I was thinking like a modern person, not like a landlord in 1946. Put yourself in that guy’s shoes. If you’re running a boarding house, and you’ve already gone so far as to subdivide the bedrooms to fit more people in, why let any of your square footage go to waste? New York real estate wasn’t stupid in the ’40s like it is now, but between the Depression, immigration, and people moving around because of the war, I bet there was always somebody who was willing to crash in a weird little space with a low ceiling if it saved a couple bucks. Maybe even more so if they were a recent immigrant coming from a country that wasn’t too popular, and they were trying to lay low until the government figured out what to do with them.”

“So you think Zimmerman—Zola—had the attic room? But then—oh, shit,” he said abruptly. “Zola died while he was a boarder here. Which means—”

“Which means there’s a decent chance he died in his little attic garret, which is a _ great _way to make a place attractive to occult powers,” Bucky said. “And now, think about it from Harold Roth’s perspective, specifically. You’re a gay man in the 1940s. It isn’t easy; you’re constantly hiding everything about who you are. You fall in love, but you’ll never have a life with that guy until you figure out how to hide it from almost everybody. So one day, you get this idea. You marry a sympathetic local widow who happens to have a terminal illness—partly because you’re a decent person, but let’s not kid ourselves: saying you want to honor her memory is a perfect way to shut up any well-meaning friends or family who might pester you to start dating women again. Sarah Rogers agrees to this—or, hell, maybe she’s even the one who proposes it—because she’s worried about having someone to take care of her son once she’s gone. Now, if you’re Roth, you can live with your boyfriend indefinitely and nobody’s the wiser, as long as you’re reasonably discreet about going back and forth between your rooms at night. But one day, one of your tenants, a suspicious foreigner with a shady past, turns up dead in your attic bedroom of unknown causes. You think it was a heart attack, but everybody else thinks the Nazis followed him to Brooklyn and killed him for revenge. Talk about juicy neighborhood gossip. It’s calling a ton of attention to you, and you need to put a lid on that shit as fast as you can. So what do you do? You close off the attic bedroom, which wasn’t bringing in that much money anyway, and you do your damnedest to forget the whole thing and move on.”

“Lot of speculation there, Barnes, but you could be onto something,” Clint agreed. “...Shit. That warning Steve kept giving you: don’t go up. He didn’t mean the second floor—”

“He meant the attic,” Bucky said grimly. “And that’s where we’re gonna find our answers about this.”

“So how do we do it? Try to find where he plastered over the access hatch, or just cut a new one?”

“Neither,” Bucky said. “Zola was probably in his fifties, or older, when he lived here; he wasn’t getting into his bedroom every night by climbing a ladder. The thing is, I kept thinking something about this room didn’t seem right, but I never figured out what it was until today. It’s not just a tiny room; it’s a room that’s about two feet shorter than it ought to be, based on the length of the hallway. Which means…” Bucky rapped his knuckles on the wall. “Harold Roth didn’t just plaster over a ceiling panel. He walled off the whole damn staircase.”

Clint was nodding, the pieces slotting into place for him just like they had for Bucky. “And now that Steve’s out of the house, this is our chance to open it up. But given that he’s spent this whole time so far trying to keep us out of the attic, are you sure it’s advisable to go up there, Barnes?”

“I have to,” Bucky said. He wanted to leave it at that—he _ tried _to leave it at that, but in the end, his own mouth betrayed him. “Whatever’s up there,” he said, “I’m gonna have to know how to deal with it in the event that Steve—that he doesn’t come back.”

“Right,” Clint said. “I’ll get the sledgehammer.”

Fifteen minutes later, there was a ragged, man-sized hole in the drywall at the end of the hall, and Clint and Bucky were standing at the bottom of a steep, narrow staircase that disappeared into darkness.

“Place your bets now, folks,” Clint said, in his best carnie barker voice. “What’ll our heroes find up there? I’ll give ya two-to-one odds on ‘mummified Nazi corpse,’ for a limited time only!”

“Thank you for that disturbing possibility, Clint,” Bucky said, hoisting one of the little handheld video cameras in his right hand. Clint would film him going up the stairs, and he’d film whatever he found there; Nat would be disappointed there wouldn’t be a reaction shot that included his face, but there was no way to make it practical. If he kept his mind on details like this, he could keep his shit together, probably, rather than thinking about the fact that he was voluntarily breaking into a haunted attic and/or maybe never going to see Steve again. “Ready?”

“Hey, you’re the one who’s about to get your brain eaten by a Nazi zombie, not me,” Clint said, and Bucky managed a tight smile. 

“Okay, so I’m about to climb through a hole in a wall and go up a dark, creepy-ass staircase to a room no living human has seen in seventy years and that a real, actual ghost specifically told me not to go into because he was trying to save my stupid skin. Here goes nothing,” Bucky said, turned around, and started climbing the staircase.

Even for attic access built in the ‘40s, it was a tight fit. Bucky had to turn sideways and edge himself up so his shoulders didn’t brush against the walls, and the dust made him cough before he even made it fully into the open space. He stopped a few steps down from the top of the staircase, let out a breath when no bony hands grabbed him—_goddammit, Clint, why’d you have to put that in my brain—_and waved his hand to clear away any cobwebs before they got him in the face, then felt around for a flat surface to put the camera down on and pointed it out into the room.

It was a larger open space than he’d expected. There was a little light seeping in through a small slatted vent on the far side of the house, but not enough of it for him to make out anything but a large open area and a few objects that might have been a bed and a tipped-over dresser, pushed way out under the eaves. The ceiling looked high enough that he could probably stand in the middle of the attic without hunching over, although anybody taller than Steve who tried to walk around up here would be in constant danger of whacking their head on a roof beam. “Gimme the light, Clint,” he said, reaching his right hand down. 

Clint put the handle of the LED lamp into his palm, and he curled his fingers around it, wincing as he felt the fresh gash on his hand start seeping again under the Band-Aid. Then he brought the light up into the attic and decided, incorrectly, that a little blood was the least of his worries.

The entire floor was covered in letters and symbols carved into every available surface, with more of them snaking up the walls and, in some places, even up into the roof beams. The carver hadn’t bothered to be neat or precise with them, apparently more concerned with speed and permanence than with aesthetics; the rough shapes reminded Bucky of nothing so much as kids carving their initials into tree trunks or park benches with pocket knives, if the kids had been inclined towards strings of Latin words and occult symbology instead of _ BENNY WAS HERE _ or _ R+J 4EVER _inside a lopsided heart. This carver’s precision had all been saved for the design at the center, to which every other line of symbols ultimately led: a perfectly round circle inside a pentagram, with smaller circles and squares etched at each point of the star.

Bucky’s job might only be occult-adjacent, but he knew what a goddamn summoning circle was when he saw it.

“Barnes?” Clint called up to him, after several seconds of silence passed. “ Buddy? You wanna share what you’re seeing with the audience? Because I know your head hasn’t, like, been sliced off and rolled down the stairs or anything, but I can’t tell if you’re breathing, and you’re creeping me out down here.”

It was a valid point. Bucky made himself inhale deeply, only then realizing that he’d been breathing so shallowly that he’d gotten lightheaded. Definitely not the best idea to be at less than full mental acuity when he was staring down something of this magnitude. “No corpses, no zombies,” he said, in a voice shakier than he would have liked. “Just some evidence of a… really disturbed mind, I think. I’m gonna come down and let you take a look, and then I think I better get some photos and send them to Nat, because it’s—” and that was when the saturated Band-Aid on his hand overflowed, and a drop of his blood spattered on the floorboards.

There wasn’t a sound, not exactly, and there was no sudden air current to ruffle his hair or brush across his face, so Bucky never quite managed to explain why the only description that occurred to him was that the whole house seemed to take a breath. A shudder ran across the wooden floorboards, visible only in the way seventy years of dust puffed up into the air until the vibration reached the center of the pentagram. And inside the star, the innermost circle pulsed, just once, with a ring of deep red light. 

There was something in the house, all right: something old and malicious, and savagely strong, something that had been asleep, but not gone, for a very long time now. And Bucky had woken it up.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lovely readers, I'm afraid this is the chapter full of sads, and the one that triggered the Major Character Death archive warning (twice, actually). Please take care of yourselves; I'm going to try to get another chapter up quickly, so that after all the feelings there'll be some rampant silliness for a chaser.
> 
> (Incidentally, [this](https://archive.org/details/Supervis1944) is the filmstrip Steve had to watch at his factory job. Things aren't perfect nowadays, not by a long shot, but good grief, the nonsense my grandma's generation had to put up with.)

A young blonde woman—well, young by comparison to everyone else at the nursing home; probably close to Wanda’s age—met Nat, Wanda, and their ghostly third wheel at the assisted living facility’s front door. “Sharon Carter,” she said, holding out a hand to Natasha. “I’m so glad you called. Aunt Peg took a turn for the worse last week, and ever since then she’s been asking for you. It’s my fault; it took me days to realize Natasha wasn’t one of the nurses. I was going to contact you through the web form and hope you saw it before—”

“We’re here now,” Natasha said. “Sharon, this is Wanda, my—”

“We’ll make a decision about ‘girlfriend’ if we ever go on an actual date,” Wanda said, and Natasha had to hand it to her: sparing her one kind of awkwardness by substituting another was a neat trick. “I hope you don’t mind if I tag along.”

“The signs say only two visitors at a time, but I don’t think they enforce it when… Well, her room is this way,” Sharon said, leading them in at a brisk pace that said more about Peggy Carter’s deteriorating condition than anything she’d told Natasha on the phone. 

Natasha caught Wanda’s eye as they rounded the corner into the patients’ wing, shooting a significant look at the door handle that Wanda was holding by the brass bar. There hadn’t been much of an opportunity to talk on the way over, and they’d let the driver fill the silence, although Wanda had murmured the occasional reassurance to Steve and, once, texted Natasha to tell her that Steve apologized for the way he kept bumping into her, which Natasha was only aware of when she felt a brush of cold air against her elbow or her thigh. Wanda met her eyes, nodded, and mouthed, “He’s here.” She nodded back, grateful; Wanda had never struck her as the kind of person who’d mess with her, but it was taking a conscious effort to believe she wasn’t about to get the rug pulled out from under her again. She owed Wanda a warning about what she was getting into with regards to trust issues, but that wasn’t the most pressing thing at the moment.

It had been one thing to hear over the phone that Peggy Carter was dying. It was different to see it in person. She’d looked frail before, but now the light in her eyes had faded to almost nothing. Natasha wasn’t convinced that she’d be able to speak to them; even the shallow rise and fall of her chest looked exhausting. Sharon went to the bedside and took her hand. “Aunt Peg,” she said, “do you remember when you asked for Natasha Romanov? She’s here to see you. Can you talk to her?”

“Natasha?” Peggy’s voice seemed to be coming from far away. “I don’t know any Natasha—” and then she gasped, and her eyes flew open.

Steve was standing beside the bed. Sharon gasped and jerked away like—well, like the obvious metaphor, and Natasha was grateful for the independent confirmation that she wasn’t going crazy. It gave her a little time to react to finally seeing this man who was in the process of breaking her best friend’s heart. He wasn’t impressive: short, bony, blonde, hunched shoulders, crooked spine; blue eyes, clenched jaw, clenched fists. “Peggy,” he said, and his voice didn’t break, but Natasha thought it was a near thing. 

“Steve.” Peggy’s voice was barely a whisper, and her eyes were filled with tears. “Steve, you came back.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “I missed you, Pegs.”

“It’s been… so long…” 

“I don’t understand what’s happening right now,” Sharon said, and Wanda said, “Shh,” took her by the arm and guided her back a few steps. She was right; this was for Peggy and Steve alone.

Steve reached for Peggy’s hand, and Natasha was astonished to see him lift it. She wondered if Peggy felt the same freezing cold she had when Steve brushed against her, or if Wanda’s magic—or just their connection—was somehow taking care of that. “Well, I couldn’t leave my best girl,” he said, and somehow, in spite of everything, he smiled. “Not when I owe her a dance.”

  
  


The first day of May 1945 started off like any other day for Steve Rogers. He woke up in the boarding house more or less like he had every day for the last eleven years: having slept poorly, with a crick in his neck and the tight, compressed feeling in his sinuses that came with every change of the seasons. He got dressed in the dark, waiting to switch on the lamp until it was time to shave in the basin of cold water he’d set out the night before; Harold laughed at him for keeping up those little economies when he wasn’t paying the electric bill, but tenement habits died hard, and anyway, there was a war on. He choked down a spoonful of liver extract, set down the half-empty bottle, and made a mental note to stop at the pharmacy on Friday, after he picked up his paycheck. He looked wearily at the glass nebulizer, with its little bottle of Asthma-Nefrin solution, and decided the heaviness in his chest wasn’t bad enough to force him to face _ that _before breakfast. Ma would’ve had words for him about it being a sin not to look after the body God gave him, but she’d have to wait until he joined her in Heaven to shout at him, and he figured he was in for a long enough slog in Purgatory that by the time he got there, she’d probably forget all about it.

Lindy, a natural early riser who made up part of her rent to Harold by cooking breakfast on weekdays, said, “Good morning, sunshine,” when he sat down at the table, and he resisted the urge to grunt at her while she loaded up his plate with bacon and eggs. She always scooped a little more out of the skillet for him, and sneaked a little of the precious sugar ration into his coffee, going so far as to smack his hand with a wooden spoon if he contested it. “Skin and bones, wasting away to nothing,” she muttered at him at least twice a week, so he tried not to leave a scrap on his plate that she could argue with him about, no matter how hungry he wasn’t. The coffee, at least, was hot and soothing going down; he’d learned to like it because it was supposed to be good for asthma, and now it was hard to start the day without it.

He was pushing his chair back when Harold came in. Harold was in his early fifties; like Arnie, his nephew and Steve’s best (only) childhood friend, he was only a little taller than Steve but considerably rounder. Or at least, that had been the case before Arnie joined the Navy four years ago; who knew what he looked like now. Steve wasn’t close with Harold, partly because he was a lot of things Steve wasn’t—loud, boisterous, and just a bit hedonistic—but he tended to see the best in people, and he was generous to a fault. Sarah Rogers’ last few months on earth had been comfortable because of him, and he’d refused to take any of Steve’s earnings for rent until Steve got promoted at the factory and threatened to move out if he wasn’t allowed to pay his own way. Steve was aware that his discomfort with Harold had more to do with the fact that he perceived himself as Harold’s charity case than with any such feelings on Harold’s part. “No, no, sit,” he told Steve, pulling up his own chair. “I’ve got news you’ll want to hear.”

Steve looked up. “New boarder?” he asked. The room across the hall from his had only been empty for a couple of days; the young man who’d had it, Joe or Jack or something, had been sent home from Italy with a bullet in his thigh and had spent a lot of time telling war stories at the dinner table before he got his discharge papers and went home to marry the childhood sweetheart who was waiting for him in Sheboygan. He’d been another person whose orbit Steve had tried to stay out of as much as possible.

“Two,” Harold said. “Found a tenant for the attic room last night.”

“Really?”

“I’ve never understood why you don’t take the attic, Steve. If you’re going to cram yourself into one of the two worst rooms in the house, you should at least get the extra space,” Lindy said.

Steve gave her an awkward smile. Lindy sincerely had no idea about Harold’s arrangement with Tom. Steve wasn’t troubled by it, either morally (for obvious reasons) or in terms of noise (he could always turn his bad ear toward them), but if he took the attic, he really would be depriving Harold of a room he could rent without giving one back. “Please,” he said. “With my asthma, some days I barely make it up one set of stairs. Who’s your taker, Harold?”

“Foreign fella, Zimmerman’s the name. Speaks English, though, so I guess he’s all right,” said Harold, and Steve, who’d already had this argument with his stepfather more times than he could count, managed to bite his tongue about that bit of cheerful xenophobia. “Haven’t met the other one, but she comes with references.”

“References?” Harold always met potential boarders, and he didn’t give a shit about references, given that some of the most sterling references in terms of so-called moral thinking came from the very people who’d be most likely to rat out him and Tom to the police if they caught on about their arrangement. “What kind of references?”

“The kind you don’t say no to,” Harold said sharply. “Be home on time tonight, would you? We’re having a welcome party, and you should be there.”

“I’ll try,” said Steve, but by the time he got to the streetcar stop he’d forgotten all about it.

The factory was the way it always was; the girls came in and did their jobs on the assembly line while he sat in the foreman’s office and got paid more to do less than any of them. Richards, the plant manager, kept asking him how he kept his numbers so high and always laughed when he said, truthfully, that he just explained to the girls how things worked and then got out of their way. Lately, Richards had started assuring him that the men coming home would need to be supervised by someone who’d had the whole length of the war to learn how to run a factory, that there was no reason Steve should think there wouldn’t be a job for him here for the rest of his life. Steve always just forced a smile in reply, because Richards would never understand if he told the truth, that that was exactly what he was afraid of.

The disturbance happened around noon, when Alice Lindell slipped early for lunch (as long as it was just once in a while, Steve pretended not to notice) and came running back in without her safety gloves or work cap, screaming that the wireless had reported that Adolf Hitler was dead. By the time he got down to the factory floor, everybody had abandoned their stations and was clustered around Alice, babbling at each other, several of them crying. Richards wouldn’t have been impressed if he’d seen how long it took Steve to get their attention, much less how he grabbed a chair and helped Alice climb up onto it. “All right, let’s everybody hear it at once, and then you’ll have your whole lunchtime to talk about it,” he said, pretending to be stern. A couple of them laughed, but they all listened with rapt attention as soon as Alice started talking about how Hitler had shot himself, or poisoned himself, or maybe both, in a bunker in Berlin. Steve crossed himself out of habit at that part, but he couldn’t bring himself to feel anything but relief. Then the lunch whistle blew and the girls took off in groups of three or four, repeating Alice’s story to each other as if they wanted to verify the truth of it, talking about which automat was most likely to have the news on the radio (as if any of them wouldn’t, today) and how they were going to celebrate later. 

Steve was heading back to his office and his packed lunch (also Lindy’s doing: _ the food won’t keep past today, so you might as well eat it and save your money for those art classes you keep talking about) _when he heard the soft sound of somebody crying. He followed it to Dorothy Harnett’s workstation, found her with her face buried in her hands, and touched her gently on the shoulder. “What’s the matter, Dot?” he asked. 

“Nothing.” Dorothy looked up at him with wet, shining eyes. “Oh, Steve, don’t you see? This means Billy’s coming home.”

It took Steve a moment to sort through the web of relationships he’d heard about only in passing; some of the girls at the factory changed boyfriends as often as they changed their stockings. Dorothy wasn’t one of them. “Is that your best guy?”

“I’ve been waiting to marry him since I was twelve years old,” Dorothy said, and burst into tears again.

Steve sighed and handed her his handkerchief. “Don’t get too excited yet,” he said. “The war’s still far from over in Europe, much less the Pacific. It could be another year before Johnny comes marching home.”

“His name’s Billy, not Johnny,” she said, and burst into tears again, and Steve gave up on trying to talk to her and just let her cry on him for a while. He sent her into the washroom to pull herself together before the other girls came back on shift, and then he made his way back to the foreman’s office, where he stared at his lunchbox with a feeling of nausea and tried to figure out what was wrong with him.

It was true what he’d told Dorothy: this wouldn’t be the end of the war, not by a long shot. There’d be surrenders, treaties, possibly a few more outbreaks of violence along the way. And that was only for Europe; there was still the whole Pacific to contend with. But this was the beginning of the end. And he did _ want _the Allied soldiers (and the Axis ones, many of whom he was sure hadn’t known what they were signing on for, and the civilians on both sides) to stop dying. How many times had he gone to Mass over the last six years specifically to pray that the war would end and Arnie would come home? He should have been as happy as those girls down on the factory floor, some of whom were working double-time in their excitement while others could barely stay in their seats. But all he felt was tired. 

He’d been living day to day for so long now, waiting for something he couldn’t put a name to. He’d thought it would be when they finally took him for the Army, but he’d given that up after his fifth attempt came dangerously close to getting him caught and jailed for lying on his enlistment form. Since then, every day he’d gotten up and gone to work, and every day he’d gone home feeling that the world hadn’t changed one bit for all his labor. At least he’d been doing something to help the war effort, even if he was an interchangeable little cog in a big machine, though. So what the hell was the next step? He couldn’t begin to picture what the country would look like when things finally went back to normal, and he couldn’t kid himself that he was going to have a place in it.

Several of the girls at the factory invited him out with them after work to celebrate, and he ended up turning them down. He thought about going to the pictures, but he didn’t think he could take another newsreel right then. So he got off the streetcar stop closest to the boarding house, as always, and walked the rest of the way home through streets humming with excitement, to find that the whole population of the boarding house was out in the tiny patch of yard between the stoop and the street.

“Steve!” Harold cried when he saw him, rushing up to him and thrusting a bottle of root beer into his hand. (Harold often reminded his lodgers that he ran a respectable boarding house; according to him, alcohol was kept strictly off the premises.) “You’ve heard the news?”

“I heard, Harold. It’s all anybody’s talked about all day. What’s,” he began, and then he forgot what he’d been saying, and damn nearly his own name besides.

The new lodger was about the prettiest woman he’d ever laid eyes on, and for a frustrated artist with access to New York’s world-class museums, that was saying something. She had these eyes that… and this dress that… Well, as long as he was an artist and not a writer, he guessed he didn’t have to worry about describing her, but boy, was she _ something. _He knew better than to judge a book by its cover, but a gorgeous dame like that certainly would be hard-pressed to think of a reason to want to talk to a complete lack of prospects like him. So when Harold shoved him in front of her and said, “Steve, this is Miss Margaret Carter, goes by Peggy. Peggy, my stepson, Steve,” he ducked his head and said, “Ma’am,” and then went up to his room to drop off his work things and hang up his suit jacket for tomorrow.

When he came back down—he almost didn’t, but Harold wanted him there for some reason, and he did have a conscience—he looked around, carefully not letting his eyes linger on Margaret-Carter-goes-by-Peggy, and when he found the other new boarder, he went over to greet him. Aaron Zimmerman didn’t seem any more pleased to be there than he was. He looked nervous, and the hand he held out to Steve was clammy with sweat. Steve would imbue that with significance only in retrospect (and he had a _ lot _of time to think about it in retrospect), but at the time, he thought that of course the poor man was already overwhelmed after fleeing from a war, and now he was being expected to socialize with strangers in his second language. The only time Steve heard him volunteer any information about himself for the rest of the evening was when Lindy said something about Germany, and he corrected her quickly to say that he was Swiss; otherwise he hardly said two words. 

Peggy was the one who carried the conversation, and Steve got more impressed with her the longer he listened. She knew everything about the war in Europe, backwards and forwards, and plenty about the Pacific War, the Mediterranean, and Africa to boot. She knew things Steve, who spent a good hour poring over the paper most evenings, had never heard before, and she wasn’t just spitting out rote knowledge. She broke it all down, with a clarity that surpassed anything in the newsreels, for Harold and Tom and Lindy and Harold’s final boarder, Walter (a quiet, solid friend of Tom’s whose draft deferral cited “nervous trouble.”) And she wasn’t shy with her opinions, which Steve was pleased to realize mostly matched up with his. Not that he was going to tell her that, of course. She probably had men lined up to tell her how smart she was about as often as they told her she was pretty, and the last thing he wanted to be in Peggy’s lovely dark eyes was tiresome.

He kept out of her way, and kept his mouth shut, while the party turned into supper and supper turned into a little impromptu dancing in the parlor, where Peggy allowed both Harold and Tom to whirl her around the floor to the music on the wireless. Lindy joined in after the first round, and she even got quiet, staid Walter to take a turn with her, but when she came after Steve, he shot her a tight smile, muttered that he’d only step on her toes, and slipped out through the kitchen, where he leaned against the back wall and stared out at the straggling tomato starts in the victory garden.

The door eased open and shut again, but he didn’t realize Peggy had come outside until he heard her say, in her soft accent, “Have you got a light?” 

She was tapping a cigarette out of a silver holder, and Steve was profoundly glad that he was sentimental enough to keep his dad’s lighter in his back pocket, even if it only got used in rare situations like this. “Don’t take this wrong,” he said, striking the little flame and holding it up for her, “but I’ll have to stand over there while you smoke. Asthma.”

Peggy looked at him, eyes unreadable in the dusky near-darkness. Then she slid the cigarette back into the case. “I can do without,” she said, and leaned her back against the house, standing close enough that her shoulder almost brushed his. 

Steve was astounded. “Aren’t you gonna tell me smoking’s good for the lungs, and anyway it’s all in my head?” 

“Certainly not! Do people really say that to you?” Peggy shook her head. _ “Americans.” _

“Aw, give us some credit, we’re not all that bad,” Steve said. “The thing you wanna be saying in that tone is, ‘New _ Yorkers.’” _

Peggy’s laugh was so wicked that if he hadn’t already been halfway to head-over-heels for her, that would have tipped the balance. “You’ve got to admit, it is a rather ridiculous country. I mean. Prohibition. Truly. What kind of idea was that?”

“You’ve found the one thing you can’t blame New York for, there. Even when Prohibition was on, we had more places to buy liquor than we’ve got churches. Harold’s kind of a stickler for the rules, but that’s mostly to protect him from being accused of anything. ‘I run a respectable house,’” he said, deliberately butchering his impression of Harold’s accent.

“I suppose he’s got good reason. He wouldn’t want to call attention to Tom and himself.”

Steve’s breath caught. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You most certainly do,” Peggy said, with a trace of a smile. “No man who’s interested in women is that good of a dancer.”

“Lady, if you’re impugning the good name of Mr. Fred Astaire,” Steve said, because that let him sidestep an actual lie, and she laughed again, delightedly this time, like she’d actually gotten the joke inside the joke. “You needn’t worry. I wouldn’t say anything to anyone.”

“Please don’t,” Steve said. “Harold’s been good to me. He was good to my Ma. And you don’t have to worry—it’s a good house, you’re safe here.”

“I should think I was rather safer here than if things were otherwise.”

“Well, not everybody sees it that way, but I’m glad you do.”

“I very much do.” Peggy straightened up, brushing an imaginary speck of dirt off her dress. “Well, this has been a lovely lack of a smoke, but I’d better get back to business,” she said. She paused with her hand on the door. “By the way, Steve, the answer is yes, I will allow you to take me out for a drink and an evening of dancing at a respectable establishment.”

Steve was still blinking when she stepped through the door. “I haven’t asked a question,” he called after her.

“That’s why I’m allowing it,” Peggy said, as the door swung shut behind her.

He didn’t think about her all the time. He didn’t even see her every day. He had his job and she had hers, and they worked her hard at the phone company; some nights she would slip in after two in the morning, and every time he wished he had the courage to offer her the coffee can where he socked away all his spare nickels and tell her he’d rather she was safe at home than picking up those extra shifts, no matter how much she needed the money. But he had it bad for her, that was never in doubt. When he finally got up the courage to ask her to go with him to the movies on Saturday, he spent the whole show with his hands on his thighs, wondering if she wanted him to do more, to put an arm around her or… It was a relief when, after the picture was over, she said, “I’m hungry. I think we should go to my favorite diner,” and led him to a spot just enough out of the way that they’d have a good long walk back. It was there that he finally broached the topic that had been bothering him for weeks: “Why are you here?”

Peggy raised an eyebrow at him. “Do you mean in an existential sense?” she asked. “Because I thought your Church had all the answers for you about that.”

“You know I’m asking why you’re in Brooklyn, and I know you’re evading the question,” he said, and she surprised him by looking pleased. 

“For work,” she said, and since challenging her had worked well once, he did it again.

“Couldn’t have worked for whatever Ma Bell’s equivalent is in England?”

“Well, of course I’m only planning to work until I get married,” she said primly, and he laughed out loud.

“If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that you’re not giving up your independence that easily. Why did you really emigrate, Peggy?”

“I haven’t lied to you,” she said. “I did come here for work. But also, maybe, to get away from home, and what was expected of me there.”

When she didn’t elaborate, Steve said, “I wouldn’t have thought anybody would be able to get away with telling a beautiful dame like you what to do. ...I mean, a woman. I mean, you are beautiful—”

He broke off, blushing furiously, and Peggy gave him that wicked laugh again. “You don’t know very much about women, do you, Steve?”

“Now that’s hurtful,” Steve said. “When I got hired on at the factory, I had to watch a whole film strip about them,” and his description of the supposedly educational materials about managing women that he’d been given at the factory kept her wildly entertained all through their cheeseburgers and chips. She returned the favor by telling him about how she’d found this diner and been befriended by one of the waitresses, and had later run off a patron who’d been harassing said waitress by threatening to sever his brachial artery. “I will make every possible effort to stay on your good side,” Steve promised, pretending to be awestruck to hide the fact that he was, actually, awestruck. Peggy seemed to embody everything he’d tried and failed to be in twenty-seven years of picking fights all over Brooklyn.

He walked her home and made a show of leaving her at the door, saying, “Will I see you again, Miss Carter?” and being told, “I imagine I’ll see you quite soon, Mr. Roth,” before she went inside. 

He waited a minute on the stoop before he followed her in, to give her a minute to head upstairs, and when he went inside, Lindy was sitting on the parlor sofa, listening to Benny Goodman. “So when are you going to ask her to marry you, Steve?” she asked, and Steve said, “Jesus, Lindy, we’ve been out one time,” to which Lindy replied, “Yes, so you’d better snap her up before she has time to get to know you,” and he grumbled something vague and went up to his room, but he didn’t tell Lindy she was wrong. 

The next Saturday, he worked the conversation around to asking her whether she would consider getting married if the right person asked her, and she said, “Oh, quite possibly! But not yet, I think. I’ve got work I need to finish first,” and he said, “Let me know if that changes, how about,” and she laughed, but he thought she knew he wasn’t exactly joking, either.

The next month, he asked her if she was still enjoying working, and she said she was, so he took her to see the Statue of Liberty and bought her an ice cream and didn’t press the issue.

In July, Richards told him to lay off thirty girls at the plant to make room for thirty GIs coming home from the war. He had nearly that many already who’d either just gotten married or were planning their weddings for the end of the summer when it wasn’t so hot, so that left him with only a handful of hard choices to make; he let the remaining girls know it wasn’t their fault. “What are you gonna do when the phone company does this?” he asked Peggy that evening, as he was going over his list, wondering how many more he’d be expected to cut by the end of summer, and she said, “I expect I’ll have to make them aware of how much they’d be losing,” so he didn’t ask her then either. But he did take his mother’s ring out of the coffee can under the floorboards and put it in his dresser drawer, in the little box the nebulizer had come in, just in case.

In the fall he came down with a bad cold, and Peggy sneaked into his room with a thermos of hot tea and a bottle of contraband whiskey, “purely for medicinal purposes, of course.” She sat on his bed, because there was no space for a chair, and he made a joke about how scandalized Lindy would be if she knew. “That settles it, then,” she said, almost playfully, “No more being ill for you, if it’s going to threaten my reputation,” and he said, “On the other hand, if you just married me, you could still wait on me hand and foot without all this sneaking around.” She was silent for just long enough that he was starting to stammer an apology for saying such a boneheaded thing, even as a joke, when she said, “I do… think about it, you know, Steve. It’s just that I also think of how hard I’ve worked to get where I am now.”

“I don’t want to take anything away from you, Peggy,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I’m grateful to you for that. And I _ am _going to answer all of your questions one of these days, I promise.” Then she kissed him on the forehead and left so quickly that he didn’t know if she was trying to avoid having him press the issue, or afraid to stay in case she found herself making a commitment she didn’t want to keep.

At Christmas he went down on one knee in the snow in Bridge Park and formally asked for permission to ask, and she said, “I…” and then, “Soon, darling, very soon I’ll be able to say yes to you, I promise.” 

“If there’s something I can help with,” Steve began, “if you need me to go to England and punch someone to let you out of an engagement your family signed you up for or something—”

“That’s very Jane Austen of you and I love you for it, but no, if anyone needs punched, I’ll do the punching,” she said, and that time they kissed for real, and he thought that if this was all the meaning there was in his life, then he was incredibly lucky to have it.

The day that cost Steve Rogers his life started off like any other day. It was March 1946, the coldest, wettest, and slushiest time of year just before the city turned the corner into spring. The flu was going around the factory, and on an otherwise completely unremarkable Wednesday, it found Steve and hit him like a freight train. Over the course of the morning, he went from feeling—not well, exactly, but no worse than usual—to being knocked flat by a fever, with every inch of his body aching and a wet, rattling cough that sounded way too much like Ma had, toward the end. Richards must have thought he was in pretty rough shape too, because he not only ordered Steve to go home and take a few days to get back on his feet but got his own car out of the parking lot and gave him a ride, which was how Steve came to be back at the boarding house just after noon, instead of well after five o’clock like most days. “You want me to come in and ring for a doctor?” Richards asked, and Steve shook his head; “My stepfather’ll be home soon, and I’ve got through worse than this on my own,” he said, somewhat nonsensically. So Richards left, and Steve dragged himself up the stairs to his bedroom and collapsed, still fully clothed, on the bed, wanting nothing but to catch a few hours’ sleep before he had to deal with anybody else being concerned at him, making him take medicine and answer questions and all the other things that sounded outright exhausting right now.

And of course, there was a noise coming from upstairs.

Steve was used to a certain amount of ambient noise in the boarding house, and he _ was _almost deaf in the one ear, but this was different from the usual footsteps and snoring and drawers sliding on their casters and, occasionally, the muffled thumps and moans from Harold’s room next door. It had stopped when he collapsed on the bed, but after no more than two minutes of silence, it started up again: strange little scraping sounds like a knife on wood, too regular to be mice and too irregular to ignore. Occasionally there’d be another sound, heavier, which Steve, good Irish Catholic that he was, immediately identified as the sound of someone down on their knees, shifting their weight around heavily enough to make the floorboards creak.

Steve had never really warmed up to Zimmerman, nor Zimmerman to the rest of the tenants in the boarding house. He kept to himself. But he claimed to have a job—at least, Harold said his rent payments were always made promptly, to the penny. So why the hell was he home in the middle of the day? And what the hell was he up to, making that kind of noise?

He tried to block it out at first. He buried his good ear in the mattress, turned his deaf one up to the ceiling, and put his pillow over his head, but the sound, the scraping sound, it was like it had little hooks in it digging into his brain. And, God, he was so tired, and everything hurt so much, and he just wanted so badly to go to sleep. He was going to have to go and tell Zimmerman to knock it off. It felt like it took a year to get up from the bed and navigate the short distance from his bedroom to the door at the bottom of the stairs. “Zimmerman,” he yelled, or tried to, pounding on the door, but his voice was shot to hell and the knocking sounded faint even to him, so there was nothing for it but to open the door and head upstairs.

When he reached the top, he was so sick and dizzy from the climb that it took him a much longer time than it should have to realize what he was seeing. Well... he still didn’t know exactly what he was seeing, but to say he knew it wasn’t good was an understatement. Zimmerman had been carving up the floor and the walls with a jackknife, strange symbols that seemed to swim and shift in front of Steve’s eyes. (His fever was clearly higher than he’d thought.) The bed and the dresser had also been pushed away to make more room for his vandalism, and there was a star in the middle of the floor with a tall white candle positioned at each of its five points.

“What the hell,” was as far as Steve got, before the blade of the knife bit into him.

It was actually the fever that saved him. A wave of dizziness had hit him, and he’d just leaned over to catch himself against the banister before he fell, so Zimmerman’s knife took him in the top of his chest, under the shoulder, rather than in the throat. He fell the rest of the way over, a spray of his own blood spattering the floor. A pulse of crimson light rose up from nowhere, and there was a hiss of steam and a metallic smell, like the carvings had turned the whole floor into a griddle.

“I was going to use the woman,” Zimmerman said, eyes gleaming madly behind his little round glasses, “but a soul is a soul, and you’ll do,” and then the fight was on.

It was probably the most pathetic fistfight in the history of pugilism, if Steve was honest. He was crap at this, and he knew it; he could just about throw a punch, but he was usually completely outclassed by his opponents on height and weight alone. Zimmerman was a rarity in not being much larger or better at this than he was, but he was alert and in possession of a clear mind, which Steve wasn’t. What gave Steve the edge, what broke through the fever and made his perception as sharp as diamonds, was the way Zimmerman had said “_the woman.” _He could have been talking about Lindy, but, God forgive him, that didn’t occur to Steve until much later. In his mind, the man had threatened Peggy, and Steve was absolutely prepared to die before he let this son of a bitch lay a finger on her. 

Zimmerman slashed at him again with the knife, and Steve blocked it awkwardly, taking a deep stinging slash across his forearm for his trouble. More blood flew, and Zimmerman smiled. “Give up, boy,” he said. “You can hardly stand. You can’t hope to stop me. Give up, and the pain will soon be over.”

“I can do this all day,” Steve said, and with everything he had left in his body, he swung his fist and, improbably, managed to connect with Zimmerman’s chin in an actual roundhouse punch, sending him sprawling directly into the central circle of the carvings on the floor.

The scream Zimmerman let out was like nothing Steve had ever heard before in his life. Afterward he wondered if it was real or some bizarre hallucination, but what he saw in the moment looked like a flimsy, smoky copy of Zimmerman was being pulled out of his body. Years ago he’d seen some stage magician perform a trick with mirrors that made it look like he’d summoned a ghostly presence, and that was the only reason his mind thought to apply the label _ ghost _ to what he was seeing; later, he would revise it to _ soul. _ Whatever it was, the pentagram took it, stretched it like taffy, and—this was the only way he could ever describe what happened—_ate _ it, destroying the essence of Zimmerman utterly. His body fell to the floor, an empty husk, and something in the air of the room seemed to shatter. The wooden floor under the pentagram was still there, he could see the scratched-up boards, but there was also a gaping hole occupying the same space with no apparent paradox, and rising up through it was a smoky, man-shaped thing in black robes that Steve had no word for except _ demon. _Where its head would have been, if it had been human, there was a blood-red skull in its place, with nothing but empty sockets in the eyes, grinning vacantly and horribly.

Steve didn’t have a crucifix or a rosary at hand, or any of the other trappings of his faith, but he got as far as a gasped, “Our Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be—” before the thing gave a furious bellow that shook the boarding house down to its foundations. And then he felt a hand on his shoulder, and a voice whispered in his ear, “You’re going to have to be very brave now, darling.”

It was his mother’s voice.

Sarah Rogers came down on the demon like the avenging angel she was, blazing with light so bright that Steve had to look away. He shielded his eyes with his hand and watched as she struggled to force the skull-thing back down into the darkness. “I name you, Johann Schmidt,” she said, “I name you and I command you,” and somehow she was winning, pushing the demon back through the portal until finally, with a sound like the pop of a riveting gun, he was through, the shadows disappearing behind him. The symbols on the floor were still glowing crimson, but the light was very slowly fading out of them, as if it was draining back into the pentagram. Then Steve was on the floor, and she was with him, stroking his hot forehead with a hand made of cool air. 

“Ma,” he began.

“Shh.” She looked like he remembered from before she got sick, with the fine laugh lines around her eyes but not the deep creases and shadows of weariness. As if she’d picked up on the thought, she said, “You look so tired, Steve,” and he would have laughed if he’d had the energy. “Tired” didn’t begin to cover it.

“Ma, how did you… how are you...”

He wanted to know how she could be here, but she shook her head. “I can’t stay,” she said, “not even for you, love. But you did well. If the summoning had been finished—but you stopped him from coming through.”

“Him—?”

“Schmidt,” she said again. “He was an evil creature when he was alive, Steve, and he’ll do anything to come back now that he’s gone. And that stupid man, his underling,” she nodded toward what had been Zola, “actually thought Schmidt would honor him for bringing him back, even after he saw how many other men Schmidt tossed aside once he’d broken them. Some people never learn.” She shook her head, and once again, Steve was seized with a weird urge to laugh at how _ her _she was, even after she’d been dead for close to ten years. “I’m so proud of you, Steve,” she said, but then she was fading, too, and when he opened his eyes again, she was gone.

Walter was the one who found the mess in the attic, and he had the extremely good sense to go and get Peggy before anyone else. He heard her say, “Dear God,” and they must have carried him back downstairs to his own bed, because that was where he was the next time he was awake. He felt oddly distant from everything that was happening, even though he was aware that his body was alternating between too hot and too cold, and there was a pain in his chest that felt like he was coming apart at the seams every time he started coughing. The part after that was mostly just one long blur. A doctor was there for some of it, and Peggy was there for a lot of it, her and Harold taking turns trying to get water and medicine into him; he kept hearing phrases like “Lost so much blood, on top of everything else,” and “Must have been lying on that cold floor for hours before Walter found him.” Then there were other people tramping through the house, severe-looking men in suits. One of those jerks had the nerve to shout at Peggy right outside the door to his bedroom, even though there was no possible way she could’ve had anything to do with it; he wanted to get up and punch that guy, for sure, except that he was out again before he could do it. There was one conversation that stood out in stark relief, coming from above him: “—have to take up the floorboards to get rid of it,” one of the men was saying, and somebody else cut him off with, “Frank, you moron, this is the kind of circle that lets one thing through, you get me? You break it after it’s been activated, you take a chance on _ other _ things using it to waltz right in. Only safe thing to do is seal it off, pray your man didn’t tell anyone else what he was up to, and wait for it to close itself back up over the next hundred years or so,” before walking away, muttering, “Goddamn rookies I gotta work with, Jesus.” Steve wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that, but nobody came with saws or hammers, so he guessed old Frank had seen reason after all.

Lindy came and sat by his bed; she was crying. He tried to tell her it was okay, this would all settle down soon and nobody was going to miss Zimmerman, and that just made her cry harder, and eventually Walter came and led her away.

At some point Harold brought a priest in, but Steve wasn’t really sure what was going on at that point, so he didn’t figure out that he was supposed to be getting extreme unction until later.

He wasn’t sure how long it went on, all told—he could have spent days slipping in and out of awareness, or it could have all happened in a single night—but the last thing he remembered with any clarity was Peggy being there, and telling her about the ring in the dresser. She went and got it and squeezed his fingers around it, but didn’t put it on. “You can ask me,” she said. “Just make it through this first, Steve,” and he tried to make it, he really tried.

But he didn’t.

After a while he was in the attic again, and his mother was with him, and this time he could feel her holding his hands in hers. There was a door—not the kind of door you found in a house, but something like the opposite of the hole Schmidt had tried to come out of, less shadowed and more welcoming. The details weren’t important, because he knew what it was, and he knew his ma was there to take him through it. But when he looked at the carvings on the floor, he could tell, without knowing exactly how, that they were still… active? Alive? And he didn’t like it. “She’s still,” he began, “they’re all still,” and his mother seemed to know what he meant before he did, because she said, “You want to stay and keep them safe.”

He didn’t deny it. “Yes.”

“They won’t know you’re doing it, Steve. They won’t be able to see or hear you. And if you choose this…” She glanced at the door. “It could be a very long time before you get another chance.”

“I know.”

“I can’t stay with you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, because he knew she was telling him that she would miss him, too.

“You were always stubborn,” she said, and then she kissed him on the forehead, like she had when he was small. She didn’t need to say she loved him; he knew. Then she went through the door, and it closed behind her.

“And you stayed there,” Peggy said, “all that time, and none of us ever knew. Why didn’t you tell us, Steve, why didn’t you try to—”

“I did try,” he said. “Thought I could, I don’t know, leave a note or something, but it never seemed to work right when I tried. Anyway, what was I supposed to say? I was dead, Peggy. I wasn’t going to ask you to wait for me. I won’t say I was glad when you left the boarding house, but I was glad you were moving on. Not, you know, mourning on forever, like I did when my Ma died. That was never what I wanted for you.” Someone had put a series of framed photos on the bedside table, each one carefully labeled: _ Mom with Elisabeth and Lorelai, 1956; Mom with Elisabeth and Lorelai, 1971; Mom with Elisabeth, Paul, Jenny, and Heather, 1986; Mom with Lorelai, John, Jason, and Christopher, 1991. _ A man who had to be her brother was also represented: _ Harry with Maria and Sharon, 2001; Harry with Sharon, 2015. _“It looks like you did fine without me.”

“Oh, I have lived a life,” Peggy murmured. “My only regret is that you didn’t get to live yours.”

Steve shrugged and changed the subject. “You were his… handler, weren’t you? Arnim Zola, I mean. That’s the thing you couldn’t tell me about, isn’t it? The war was over, but you were still protecting us. Keeping an eye on him after he defected.”

“And a bang-up job I did, letting him almost succeed at a full-scale summoning right under my nose. I learned from that, believe me.”

“Seems to me like they kept you pretty busy with other stuff, and it was pretty damn irresponsible of them to not only expect you to take that on but to let him out in the general population,” Steve said, starting to get heated, and Peggy managed a laugh and waved away his objections. 

“You don’t need to fight that battle for me, dear, I did it for myself, and we did make some changes to how things were done after that. What about you? Was it… was it terribly lonely?”

Steve shrugged again. “It wasn’t exactly fun, but I got used to it. I made sure things stayed quiet. After a while, I figured out that the less activity there was in the house, the quieter things were in the attic. It was like the portal needed people around to stay active, like it took energy from them, I guess. So whenever Harold took on new boarders, I just sort of… encouraged them to leave, and after Lindy got married and moved out, I got Harold and Tom and Walter to go, too. It was mostly little stuff, making the stairs creak, moving things around, banging on the boiler at night. Tom finally told Harold he wanted to go live somewhere warm, and they did. Arnie had come back to visit once, but he never wanted to stay; I think he ended up in New Jersey—”

“Traitor,” Peggy said, eyes lighting up in the old wicked amusement.

“Don’t even talk to me about it,” Steve said. “Anyway, after that, whenever anybody bought the place, I made sure they had good reasons not to stay. My job got a lot easier when the house got a reputation for being haunted. And there was always kind of a _ wrong _feeling in the attic after Zimmerman—Zola—did his thing, but it faded so much with time that it’s hard to even sense it anymore. I think it’ll be gone for good in a few years, and I guess I thought I’d just sort of fade away with it.”

“And you would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.”

Steve suspected there was a reference there that he wasn’t getting, but he laughed anyway. Then he said, “Peggy—”

“I never stopped loving you either, Steve,” she said, and that was all that needed to be said, really. Whatever energy had buoyed her up, let her rally this one last time to talk to him again, it was starting to desert her now, and Steve knew what was coming. He took his hand in hers, trying not to think too much about how that was possible so he didn’t spoil the miracle that had brought them back together here at the end.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” he said. “It won’t hurt.”

“I haven’t been afraid of dying for years,” Peggy said. “Only of being alone when I did, and I won’t be, now, thanks to you.”

It felt like a long time that they waited, while Peggy’s body gradually gave up its hold on life. Sharon came over to reiterate how much she loved Peggy, and to repeat messages from the rest of the family that Steve sensed had already been conveyed many times over the last few days, and she stayed until Peggy’s breathing slowed and stopped. A little after that, he discovered that Peggy was standing beside him, and they weren’t in the hospice room anymore, but somewhere else, with that strange bright doorway in front of them again. And then Peggy asked him the million-dollar question: “Are you coming this time?” 

Steve had been thinking about it all day, and he’d gone back and forth on his answer a dozen times, but the truth was, he’d always known what he was going to do. “I’ve seen it through this far,” he said, “I think I should stay until I’m really sure it’s over.” He hesitated, then said, “I’ll see you again. I mean, I still don’t know exactly how any of this works, but if my ma could come back for me, then I’m pretty sure I can promise you that much.”

“I won’t say goodbye, then,” Peggy said. _ “Au revoir, _I suppose?”

_ “Au revoir,” _Steve agreed. He couldn’t really say he kissed her; they both moved into the kiss at the same time. Then she stepped back, and without ever really moving, she was through the doorway and gone.

It was a long time before anybody said anything, and at some point Steve wound up back in the room, because he was aware of it when a nurse came in and confirmed to Sharon that Peggy was gone. After that, nobody seemed sure exactly what they were supposed to do. Sharon cried a little, and Steve asked Wanda to thank her, at which point Sharon started thanking him instead: “I knew there was something she’d never really… finished in her life, you know?” she said. “I’m glad she got closure on it before the end.” It was the first time Steve had heard the word _ closure, _ and it sounded right to him; maybe it was something he’d needed as well. 

Natasha turned on her phone, which she’d powered down some hours earlier, to call yet another car to take them home. She frowned when it immediately started to vibrate with messages. “Bucky, what the hell,” she said, skimming through them, and then her face changed.

“What is it?” Steve said. “Is everything okay?”

“I… I’m not sure,” said Natasha. “But, Steve, I think we’d better get you home right now.”


End file.
